David Welly Sombra Rodrigues, a 35-year-old French teacher, loves to travel. After the pandemic forced him to offer his language classes virtually, he took the opportunity and moved from Brazil to Europe, where he could take trains to new cities, with great delight, all documented on Instagram.
This month, a photo he took in Ireland for his 7,000+ followers on the platform went viral. But he didn’t realize it until a friend texted him, indicating a news story about “The Follower” [O Seguidor]a digital art project that shows just how much can be captured by webcams in public spaces – and how surprising it can be for those who are unwittingly filmed by them.
The artist combined Instagram photos with video footage that showed the process of taking them. He did not include the users’ names or profiles, but Rodrigues’ friends recognized him.
In his case, a webcam operated by a company called EarthCam captured the effort made to take a seemingly casual photo of him leaning against the typical red entrance to Temple Bar in Dublin, Scotland.
He tried a few different angles and poses, did a little costume change, and eventually added a prop — a pint of the famous pub’s beer. Stories about the project incorrectly described the subjects of the play, including Rodrigues, who goes by @avecdavidwelly on Instagram, as influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. But most of them were just typical social media users, with much smaller audiences.
“I was completely shocked,” Rodrigues said in an interview with Zoom. “I didn’t expect someone to be recording me.”
The artist behind “The Follower,” Dries Depoorter, said his project demonstrates both the artifice of social media images and the dangers of increasingly automated forms of surveillance.
“If one person can do that, what can a government do?” asked Depoorter, 31.
Live from Times Square
Depoorter, who lives in Ghent, Belgium, came up with the idea for “The Follower” more than a month ago, researching cameras installed in public places that he could use for another art project. While watching a Times Square live feed, he saw a woman taking pictures of herself for “a long time”. Thinking she might be an influencer, he tried to find the product of her extensive shoot among newly tagged Instagram photos of Times Square.
He didn’t get anything, but it got him thinking.
The 24-hour broadcast that Depoorter watched — titled “Live From NYC’s Times Square!” — was provided by the New Jersey-based company EarthCam, which specializes in real-time camera feeds. EarthCam has set up a network of live streaming webcams “to transport people to interesting and unique locations around the world that may be difficult or impossible to experience in person,” according to its website. Founded in 1996, EarthCam monetizes cameras through advertising and licensing the footage.
Depoorter realized he could come up with an automated way to match these publicly available cameras with the photos people posted on Instagram. So, over a two-week period, he collected EarthCam footage streamed online from Times Square in New York, Wrigley Field baseball stadium in Chicago, and Temple Bar in Dublin.
Rand Hammoud, an anti-surveillance activist with the global human rights organization Access Now, said the project illustrated how often people are filmed without their knowledge by surveillance cameras, and how easy it is to mount these movements using automated biometric scanning technologies. .
“It’s a dystopian reality that many people don’t realize is present today,” Hammoud said.
EarthCam declined to answer questions about its cameras and the risks they could pose to the privacy of individuals filmed by them, in an era of more powerful biometric tracking technologies. The company’s chief marketing officer, Simon Kerr, said only that Depoorter “used images and videos from EarthCam without authorization, and such use violates our copyright.”
Depoorter said his project isn’t about the specific companies that made it possible. “It’s not just EarthCam,” he said. “There are many unprotected cameras all over the world.”
privacy violation
While recording EarthCam feeds, Depoorter simultaneously downloaded public Instagram photos that users tagged as being from these locations.
Instagram discourages mass photo collection from its platform. “Automatically collecting information” is a violation of the company’s terms of use and can lead to a user being banned.
“We reached out to the artist to learn more about this piece and understand his process,” said Thomas Richards, a spokesperson for Meta, the company that owns Instagram. “Privacy is a priority for us, as is protecting people’s information when they share content on our platforms.”
After collecting data from EarthCam and Instagram came the hard part: finding the right people in the digital haystack.
Depoorter had previously done art projects on the astonishing gaze of public cameras that forced him to write software to classify many video footage. Last year, he created the “Flemish Rollers” project, which highlights Belgian politicians on social media looking at their phones during parliamentary sessions streamed live on YouTube. Before that, he had used open surveillance cameras to detect pedestrians ignoring red traffic lights — photos he sold online for the cost of fines violators would have to pay if caught.
To search the faces of Instagram photos in EarthCam images, Depoorter relied on open source facial recognition software, which can be found on sites like GitHub.
“It’s not perfect,” he said. It was necessary to do an extensive manual review of the suggested matches to find the ones that were accurate. As for the handful of people he chose for “The Follower,” Depoorter wanted a diverse group, which included a couple taking a picture kissing in Dublin, two friends strolling through Times Square, and a woman who had hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. . Depoorter did not contact them in advance and said he had not heard from any of them.
Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a former White House technology adviser and professor at Brown University, said he found the project intriguingly “subversive” in showing the possibilities for invasion of privacy with modern technology. But he said Depoorter’s use of surveillance on “random people” was unsettling.
“You don’t break into someone’s house to show that you can break into their house,” Venkatasubramanian said. “You shouldn’t do this unless you’re asked.”
a willing subject
Depoorter is based in the European Union, which has firm privacy rules, called the General Data Protection Regulation, to protect citizens’ personal data, including their photos and biometric information. Omer Tene and Gabe Maldoff, privacy attorneys at the law firm Goodwin, said there are exemptions in the law for artistic expression, but that artists should be mindful of how the work will affect their themes.
“I don’t think ‘art’ gives you a free pass,” Maldoff said.
Depoorter didn’t reveal the names or Instagram handles of the people he included in his project because, according to him, he didn’t want them to “get too many messages”.
He declined to identify them to The New York Times, with the exception of Rodrigues, on the condition that the Times not write about the Brazilian French teacher without his explicit permission.
Rodrigues said he doesn’t mind the attention. “I love taking pictures,” she said. “I love recording videos. I’m not ‘low profile’.”
Rodrigues has had his Instagram account for a decade. He uses it to publicize his business, showing potential customers the experiences that a new language can provide. He said he didn’t mind being included in Depoorter’s project, who was happy with the increased exposure and even posted about it on Instagram, as a “story” that expired after 24 hours.
I am Frederick Tuttle, who works in 247 News Agency as an author and mostly cover entertainment news. I have worked in this industry for 10 years and have gained a lot of experience. I am a very hard worker and always strive to get the best out of my work. I am also very passionate about my work and always try to keep up with the latest news and trends.
