People Staring at Computers
This reminds me of a random, but chilling, scene in &quot;Minority Report&quot;. The protagonist confronts a man he thinks is responsible for killing his child.<p>The man decides to reassure the protagonist by explaining how kind he was to the child, and made sure the child didn&#x27;t suffer when he killed him. He&#x27;s presenting it as though this is a legitimate defense for such an obvious violation. The part that sticks with me is the man&#x27;s seeming sincerity in believing he&#x27;s making a case for himself, &quot;yeah I did this horrible thing, but I did it in the nicest way possible so it&#x27;s really kinda big of me if you think about it&quot;<p>This post fills me with the same chills. The author&#x27;s utter lack of culpability for such a viscerally gross violation and strange attempts to spin it as though he&#x27;s kind of a good person for doing it in a slightly less terrible way than he could have otherwise done it...<p>To be clear, he didn&#x27;t go out and do a security research project with ethical standards in place. He made it clear how laughable he considers the concept of &#x27;consent&#x27; (an ethical way to do this might&#x27;ve been to take people&#x27;s pictures, then ask them if they were OK with sharing it right after. He doesn&#x27;t consider such a process at all)<p>Instead, he thought of an amoral and illegal way for him to use people without their consent, for his own pleasure, curiosity, and amusement and decided to call it &#x27;art&#x27;. There are more horrible ways he could have done the above, sure. But that argument to me sounds as hollow as the &quot;but he didn&#x27;t suffer&quot; argument from the movie.<p>Him expressing his own sense of magnanimousness and ironic sense of victimhood at the end of it... it really is a scary glimpse into the mind of such people.<p>It&#x27;s sad because it&#x27;s very easy to misconstrue this as a &quot;security researcher gets feds sent on him by apple&quot; story, and I think lots of people are basically trying to frame it that way, but it&#x27;s not that at all. To me, it&#x27;s clearly &quot;jackass doesn&#x27;t understand consent, apple calls the feds, still a jackass, still doesn&#x27;t understand&quot;.<p>[Note: yes I know the character in the movie is revealed as a bluff shortly after, the scene sticks with me because of the character&#x27;s apparent sincerity at the moment]<p>[Additional Note: yes I know many of these companies also don&#x27;t respect consent. Them not respecting it is not an excuse for everyone to behave the same way.]