If there's one thing that becomes clear in so-called "First Amendment Audit" videos (where people, especially in the United States, simply go to public spaces to film and see if security guards and police officers respect their First Amendment rights to do so) is that a good portion of people are afraid of people with cameras.
Note that I didn't write just "cameras", but "people with cameras". Which is the big irony here.
Nowadays there are security cameras pretty much everywhere. In most cities you can't walk any major street, or be in any public building, without there being at least half dozen cameras filming all the time. Yet people never complain about that.
But have a person filming with a camera, and people get uncomfortable and uneasy. Sometimes they get really confrontational and aggressive. A good majority of people have the misconception that you need people's permission to film them in public, that it's illegal to do so without permission. If you then point to some security camera in the vicinity, filming the whole thing, and ask why that one can film without anybody's permission, they become stumped. They don't know what to respond (and will usually mumble something, or deflect, or become angry.)
Many people seem to be morbidly afraid of people with cameras. There are tons and tons of First Amendment Audit videos where security guards, employees and sometimes just private citizens call the police for the sole reason that someone is filming the place, from a public area. (What the police does when they arrive varies quite wildly. In the best case scenarios they just talk to the person who called them and then leave, without even engaging with the person filming. In the worst case scenario they harass the person filming, making threats and demands that they don't have the legal right to do, and sometimes even arresting the person. Although, positively, this seems to happen relatively rarely.)
Yet, the exact same people who are so afraid of people with cameras pay no attention to the myriads of security cameras around them. Not even when they are reminded that they are there. Not even when they have absolutely no idea who those cameras belong to, and who is watching. For some reason people just instinctively trust that security camera footage is somehow "ok".
Note that I didn't write just "cameras", but "people with cameras". Which is the big irony here.
Nowadays there are security cameras pretty much everywhere. In most cities you can't walk any major street, or be in any public building, without there being at least half dozen cameras filming all the time. Yet people never complain about that.
But have a person filming with a camera, and people get uncomfortable and uneasy. Sometimes they get really confrontational and aggressive. A good majority of people have the misconception that you need people's permission to film them in public, that it's illegal to do so without permission. If you then point to some security camera in the vicinity, filming the whole thing, and ask why that one can film without anybody's permission, they become stumped. They don't know what to respond (and will usually mumble something, or deflect, or become angry.)
Many people seem to be morbidly afraid of people with cameras. There are tons and tons of First Amendment Audit videos where security guards, employees and sometimes just private citizens call the police for the sole reason that someone is filming the place, from a public area. (What the police does when they arrive varies quite wildly. In the best case scenarios they just talk to the person who called them and then leave, without even engaging with the person filming. In the worst case scenario they harass the person filming, making threats and demands that they don't have the legal right to do, and sometimes even arresting the person. Although, positively, this seems to happen relatively rarely.)
Yet, the exact same people who are so afraid of people with cameras pay no attention to the myriads of security cameras around them. Not even when they are reminded that they are there. Not even when they have absolutely no idea who those cameras belong to, and who is watching. For some reason people just instinctively trust that security camera footage is somehow "ok".
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