{"id":12137,"date":"2017-11-19T09:18:32","date_gmt":"2017-11-19T17:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=12137"},"modified":"2019-07-14T10:35:56","modified_gmt":"2019-07-14T17:35:56","slug":"online-privacy-lie-fascism-bad-travel-political-lessons-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/19\/online-privacy-lie-fascism-bad-travel-political-lessons-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Online Privacy is a Lie, Fascism is Bad, All Travel is Political, & Other Lessons from the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Via Ed Needs a Bicycle on Flickr (Creative Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More than one person sent me the photo of Steve Bannon (the hate mongering propagandist and the architect behind much of the current administration’s racist and destructive policies), and a well-known travel blogger in an airport lounge. You can see the windows out onto the runway in the background. Bannon has his arm around the blogger — who’s wearing a vague smile.<\/p>\n

Update, July 2019: I left something out when I first posted this — I did some work for this blogger in 2015. I recently donated every dime I earned to RAICES<\/a>. I should have done it sooner, the minute that photo appeared. I have no good excuses for delaying and I hope in the future, the amount of time it takes me to act won’t be as long.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Normalizing white nationalists is dangerous and wrong. That’s why I reposted the photo to my own Facebook feed with this text:\u00a0Steve Bannon is not an ironic photo opp. Make a note of it, bloggers. Scratch that, make a note of it, ALL HUMANS.\u00a0<\/em>I set the privacy on the post to “Friends” and I waited. I knew I’d hear about it. It took about four hours before the first person gently slapped my hand.<\/p>\n

“Did you know that picture was private?”<\/p>\n

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NOPE:\u00a0 James Corden kisses Sean Spicer at the Emmy Awards. Photo by Invision\/AP\/REX\/@Shutterstocknow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A handful of well-meaning folk contacted me, on the Facebook thread and off, to suggest I was out of line for sharing a private photo. Sure, that’s<\/em> the problem here. Other folks suggested I should have taken my objections to the source via the back channels, as though that would make any difference at all.<\/p>\n

It’s noteworthy that the few people who messaged me were primarily white men who are not American or don’t live in the US. I wonder if they did not understand the sheer monstrosity of Bannon, a critical strategist behind the Muslim travel ban and the executive chairman of the anti-Semitic, misogynist, white supremacist website, Breitbart News. I had one conversation with a friend who suggested Bannon might be analogous with Nigel Farage, the British politician behind the xenophobia fueled Brexit policy. I’m not sure Farage is quite as a bad as Bannon, though I wouldn’t rush to get an airport snap with Farage, either.<\/p>\n

But hey, If a person doesn’t want a photo shared, even if they don’t ask me themselves<\/em>, I’ll respect that and take it down. We’re left with my description of the photo, yielding the same results. I assumed these take-down requests were coming indirectly from the blogger anyway because, as one person told me, he was “upset he was being dragged so badly in your thread.” My private<\/em> thread, though I will be the first to admit I knew he would see the contents, someone would send him screenshots. Social media is a sieve, not a safe.<\/p>\n

(A few people contacted me to voice their support, too. Thank you, I really needed to hear that.)<\/p>\n

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NOPE:\u00a0Jimmy Fallon ruffles Donald Trump’s hair. Photo by Andrew Lipovsky\/NBC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I swapped the photo out with one of Jabba the Hut, and that’s the photo that remains.\u00a0I also checked back with the person who sent me the picture first. “I don’t follow him,” he told me. “Maybe it was set to friends of friends<\/em>.\u00a0 I don’t know — all I know is I could see it. Plus, he’d been posting about seeing Bannon in the airport on Twitter, so…”<\/p>\n

A tangle of issues came up as a result of my sharing that photo. I’ve spent about 48 hours trying to unpack them.<\/p>\n

Online privacy is a lie<\/strong>. I spent hours reading about violation of privacy — it appears this particular complaint doesn’t hold water. The photo was taken in a public space where there’s no baseline expectation of privacy. One of the sources I read said Facebook is similar to a public space and even if your settings are tightened to limited distribution, you’re making a mistake to think your so-called friends will observe that. You’ve placed something — a photo, a statement — in a place where it’s easily accessible to the public. There are some exceptions to this — nude photos are the big one, or the distribution of deeply personal and\/or private materials — but a candid airport photo with a public figure doesn’t check the boxes on this. Much of what I read said if you have deep privacy concerns, you shouldn’t use your phone as a photo device, ever. It’s hard to erase your tracks once you’ve posted something — you have no idea where stuff ends up. For example, there’s a screenshot of the blogger’s public Twitter feed (“Should I get a picture with Bannon?”) in my Facebook thread, so it doesn’t help him that he deleted the tweets. Let’s reiterate a key point, too: The subject DID NOT ASK ME to take the photo down.<\/p>\n

You might not own the image.\u00a0<\/strong>Even if you’re in the photo, the rights to the photo belong to the person who clicked the shutter. I talked to a photographer with a large international publication and he told me their contracts are very explicit about rights. If he hands his camera to a stranger so he can be in the picture, he doesn’t own the photo. He was just<\/em> going through this very topic with his agency as they are looking to licence much of his work for stock photography and it’s clear:\u00a0 if he did not shoot the photo, he cannot claim the rights. The most ridiculous case<\/a> about this topic recently settled out of court\u00a0 — a monkey (an actual monkey) hit the shutter on a photographer’s camera and animal rights group PETA argued the photographer did not have rights to the photo as he did not shoot it himself. You can’t claim a rights violation if you didn’t shoot the photo.<\/p>\n

All travel is political.\u00a0<\/strong>It pained me to stand on a stage at a Missouri travel conference and say, “Hey, so, when I read about Missouri prior to my trip, I found a whole lot of stuff about the NAACP travel advisory<\/a>.” Speaking up, even in tiny ways, is hard, it’s awkward, it’s scary.\u00a0And, even the kindest, most well-meaning of people will miss the point. “Why you gotta bring that up? Why you gotta talk about that? Why you gotta make people uncomfortable?”<\/p>\n

(I figure I can just sit back and wait for the hate mail on this, too. I’m sure lots of people would like me to shut up. Noted. Maybe ask yourself why you want me to shut up?)<\/p>\n

I’m not always a nice person, and bringing that stuff up isn’t, you know, nice. But you take your politics with you into the world, whether you want to or not. Most Americans and Brits are especially aware of this right now, between Brexit and the atrocious embarrassment in the White House. Whether we like it or not, it’s our job to serve as ambassadors for a better idea of America (or Britain or Australia, or hell, while we’re at it Myanmar, if that’s where you’re from) every time we travel. And if we have a platform through which to spread our ideals, the burden of responsibility increases.<\/p>\n

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By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) August 14, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n