Category: Writing

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Photography Writing

Street Photography in a More Private World

Jack Layton Ferry Terminal, Toronto, 2023

For the past several months Neale James has talked about how new laws which prevent taking pictures of people on the street will inhibit the documenting of history in certain jurisdictions. I’ve been mulling this over while trying to determine what I really think about this line of assessment and photographic concern. As a street photographer it seems like an issue where I’ve got some skin in the game!

In short, while I’m sympathetic with this line of argumentation I’m not certain that I agree. So I wrote a longish email to Neale—which was included in this week’s Photowalk podcast—and I’ve largely reproduced the email below as a blog post.

I should probably start by stating my priors:

  1. As a street photographer I pretty well always try to include people in my images, and typically aim to get at least some nose and chin. No shade to people who take images of peoples’ backs (and I selectively do this too) but I think that capturing some of the face’s profile can really bring many street photos to life.1
  2. I, also, am usually pretty obvious when I’m taking photos. I find a scene and often will ‘set up’ and wait for folks to move through it. And when people tell me they aren’t pleased or want a photo deleted (not common but it happens sometimes) I’m usually happy to do so. I shoot between 28-50mm (equiv.) focal lengths and so it’s always pretty obvious when I’m taking photos, which isn’t the case with some street photographers who are shooting at 100mm . To each their own but I think if I’m taking a photo the subjects should be able to identify that’s happening and take issue with it, directly, if they so choose to.

Anyhow, with that out of the way:

If you think of street photography in the broader history of photography, it started with a lot of images with hazy or ghostly individuals (e.g. ‘Panorama of Saint Lucia, Naples’ by Jones or ’Physic Street, Canton’ by Thomson or ‘Rue de Hautefeuille’ by Marville). Even some of the great work—such as by Cartier-Bresson, Levitt, Bucquet, van Schaick, Atget, Friedlander, Robert French, etc—include photographs where the subjects are not clearly identified. Now, of course, some of their photographs include obvious subjects, but I think that it’s worth recognizing that many of the historical ‘greats’ include images where you can’t really identify the subject. And… that was just fine. Then, it was mostly a limitation of the kit whereas now, in some places, we’re dealing with the limitations of the law.

Indeed, I wonder if we can’t consider the legal requirement that individuals’ identifiable images not be captured as potentially a real forcing point for creativity that might inspire additional geographically distinctive street photography traditions: think about whether, in some jurisdictions, instead of aperture priority being a preferred setting, that shutter priority is a default, with speeds of 5-15 second shutters to get ghostly images.2

Now, if such a geographical tradition arises, will that mean we get all the details of the clothing and such that people are wearing, today? Well…no. Unless, of course, street photographers embrace creativity and develop photo essays that incorporate this in interesting or novel ways. But street photography can include a lot more than just the people, and the history of street photography and the photos we often praise as masterpieces showcase that blurred subjects can generate interesting and exciting and historically-significant images.

One thing that might be worth thinking about is what this will mean for how geographical spaces are created by generative AI in the future. Specifically:

  1. These AI systems will often default to norms based on the weighting of what has been collected in training data. Will they ‘learn’ that some parts of the world are more or less devoid of people based on street photos and so, when generating images of certain jurisdictions, create imagery that is similarly devoid of people? Or, instead, will we see generative imagery that includes people whereas real photos will have to blur or obfuscate them?
  2. Will we see some photographers, at least, take up a blending of the real and the generative, where they capture streets but then use programs to add people into those streetscapes based on other information they collect (e.g., local fashions etc)? Basically, will we see some street photographers adopt a hybrid real/generative image-making process in an effort to comply with law while still adhering to some of the Western norms around street photography?

As a final point, while I identify as a street photographer and avoid taking images of people in distress, the nature of AI regulation and law means that there are indeed some good reasons for people to be concerned about the taking of street photos. The laws frustrating some street photographers are born from arguably real concerns or issues.

For example, companies such as Cleaview AI (in Canada) engaged in the collection of images and, subsequently, generated biometric profiles of people based on scraping publicly available images.

Most people don’t really know how to prevent such companies from being developed or selling their products but do know that if they stop the creation of training data—photographs—then they’re at least less likely to be captured in a compromising or unfortunate situation.

It’s not the photographers, then, that are necessarily ‘bad’ but the companies who illegally exploit our work to our detriment, as well as to the detriment of the public writ large.

All to say: as street photographers, and photographers more generally, we should think broader than our own interests to appreciate why individuals may not want their images taken in light of technical developments that are all around us. And importantly, the difference is that as photographers we do often share our work whereas CCTV cameras and such do not, with the effect that the images we take can end up in generative AI, and non-generative AI training data systems, whereas the cameras that are monitoring all of us always are (currently…) less likely to be feeding the biometric surveillance training data beast.

  1. While, at the same time, recognizing that sometimes a photo is preferred because people are walking away from the camera/towards something else in the scene. ↩︎
  2. The ND filter manufacturers will go wild! ↩︎
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Photo Essay Photography Writing

Capturing a January Snowstorm with the iPhone 14 Pro

Toronto ended up getting a proper snowstorm late January. While it wasn’t the first snow of the year it was the first proper storm that saw 15cm of snow (or more) coming down over the course of many hours. In fact, the snow was coming down heavily enough that I didn’t want to risk my non-weather sealed cameras: I’m happy to get them damp by snow but in this weather they were certain to get soaked.

So what was I to do? Despite not being in love with the iPhone 14 Pro it’s a weather sealed camera and capable of making some decent images. So I grabbed it, donned my winter weather gear and some smartphone-compatible gloves, and headed out for a few hours of capturing the city.

When I went out I decided to increase the exposure a bit–set to 0.7–to keep the snow from coming out grey, but I found that exposure kept resetting. I half suspect that this was due to a combination of the somewhat bulky gloves I was using and the water on the screen resetting or modifying the exposure slider. Still, given that I was shooting in ProRAW I could generally modify exposures to my taste when I got home and did some light post-processing.

Speaking of the ProRAWs…I accidentally left the 24mm (equiv.) sensor set to 48MP images from the last time I was shooting with it! Which in hindsight explains why it often took so long to go from pressing the shutter button to capturing an image; I’d thought the delay was because of an issue with the conductive gloves or the cold or the water on the screen but, in fact, was was due to the file size. As always, I should have fully checked my equipment (and its software) before heading out. I’m just glad that I have a 512GB iPhone so at least I didn’t need to worry about running out of space on the device!

I did end up coming home with some smaller files using the main sensor from when I was shooting in burst mode. In burst you will default down to taking 12MP images on the 24mm (equivalent) lens and I used it when shooting faster-action scenes earlier in my walk.

In some notes to myself about the iPhone 14 Pro, I previously wrote:

The 48 megapixel main camera (24mm equivalent) when shot at its full resolution, in ProRAW, doesn’t work well for street photography. I tend to shoot bursts to get people stepping just so in a shot, but there’s an approximately 1 second or so delay in capturing one image and being able to capture another. That’s a shame as this is supposed to be a highlight feature and the A16 processor and specialized ISP just cannot process things fast enough for how I shoot street.

At the time, I didn’t realise the camera app would shift from taking 48MP to 12MP images under burst mode. It’s, also, not something that is apparent in the user interface. Just like, when in the camera app, there’s no indication or warning that you’re shooting at 48MP! All of which is to say that the stock Camera app on iPhone is getting very long in the tooth and is in desperate need of an overhaul.

Lest it sound that I only have negative things to say I should be very clear: I managed to go out and make images for several hours and came back with some that I liked. I couldn’t have gone out with my other camera gear. Since I thought I was shooting with the 12MP 24mm (equiv.) main lens quite often I tried to be fastidious in how I framed shots because I wasn’t going to be able to crop much. By happy accident, this ultimately meant that the images shot on that lens ended up being much higher quality than anticipated due to capturing 48MP images in all of their glory.

I also took the time to use the ultra-wide as well as telephoto lenses. I admit that I just don’t have a huge amount of experience shooting ultra-wide and so this was a fun experience in seeing what I could capture in the scene. Other images that didn’t quite make the cut saw me experiment with cutting the frame in two, with a divider in the centre of the frame and building scenes to the left and right of it. While I didn’t get any publishable-quality photos it was a good experiment and reminded me of just how challenging it is to replicate photographic masters who use this technique, like Sean Penn. The images I made with the 78mm lens, however, often ended up being too soft and ultimately I’ve opted to publish only one of them (above, woman walking away from sign with an arrow on it while looking at her phone).

When I went out I had hoped that I’d be able to capture the sense of how much the snow was beating down on everyone in the city. I think this came true as the iPhone didn’t shoot above 1/120 of a second the whole day, and at times was as low as 1/23. The result is that the snow is apparent and the subjects–unless they were relatively unmoving–have a bit of blur to them as they raced from place to place.

At the same time, because of the snow most people couldn’t move as quickly as they would on clear sidewalks and roads. It was an interesting personal lesson, insofar as I realised that in this weather I can probably easily get away with 1/80 to 1/200 and get sufficiently sharp images that still communicate the fury of the weather.

As I kept walking, however, a number of annoyances returned. I absolutely hate how holding your finger on the shutter button in the stock iPhone Camera app records a video instead of firing of a burst shot. This was a problem because when I was trying to take a single image sometimes I’d get a very short video, instead, meaning that I was without a photograph! I get that this is how most people probably want to use the app but it’d be nice to be able to customise the app’s functionality some. Especially if these are supposed to be ‘professional’ devices. Also, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, the Podcasts app also sometimes sped up the episodes I was listening to, or even skipped to the next podcast. Frustrating!

It had been quite some time since I’d walked through Chinatown during a real dropping of snow and it was great to see very familiar scenes in slightly different situations. Catching someone shovelling while, at the same time, a customer was taking refuge in a doorway was a real catch for me. I’m sure I’ve captured images from this location (as in the very spot I was standing in to make the image) dozens of times; this is a very different feel and texture than those I tend to make at this location. Win!

I ended up walking through Kensington Market last year during a slightly-less intense snowstorm and was rewarded with an image that was amongst my favourites of the year. I don’t think that I caught images that will necessarily fall into the same bucket this year, in part because several times I wasn’t able to activate the iPhone camera quickly enough. Still, I liked capturing how desolate the Market was, which was largely reflective of how quiet it was.

I did like how, towards the end of the shoot and into the evening, the snow started to come down even heavier which had the effect of leaving little droplets of water on the lens. While these blotches do upset the ‘perfection’ of the image I think they, also, have the effect of making it that much clearer what the weather was like and ideally put the viewer more firmly into the cold and wet scene.

It was on my return trip home that the worst of the weather was apparent for those who had to brave the wet snow that had piled up over the past many hours. There were relatively few pedestrians out, even at the major intersections, as compared to better-weather times. Hoods were up and high, foot slips were common, and cars were throwing up huge volumes of grey and brown slush onto anyone who happened to get too close to the curb.

Amongst the bravest of the brave were the few cyclists who continued to try and share the road with Toronto drivers. Between the streets that hadn’t been cleared and the erratic behaviour of vehicles whose owners hadn’t driven in the snow in over a year, it seemed risky and not that much faster than just walking. Still, they made for interesting subjects when they were waiting for a chance to get onto the road and make their way to their destination, and especially with the streetcar lines overhead layered with snow.

While cyclists arguably had a hard time of things, even harder times were surely experienced by the parents I saw who were trying to push strollers around. The snow routinely got into the wheels with the effect that parents were just pushing the strollers without the help of the wheels. Still, almost every stroller had a plastic barrier separating the child from the storm which at least meant that the little one’s weren’t getting soaked on their ways home.

Ultimately the images that I came back with after several hours of shooting are qualitatively different from anything I’d have made with my Fuji X100F or Ricoh GR or GRiiix. At least to my eye, they have a feel of an older camera and, due to the slow shutter speeds, many of the images remind me of film photographs I’ve seen of past Toronto winter storms from the 1970s and 1980s. Many also have an almost more intimate quality, to my eye, due to the technical imperfections that resulted from lighting conditions and occasional focus challenges. Still, I feel like they present the experience of the storm that lasted throughout the day and night, and which left the city blanketed in white by the following morning.

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Links Writing

Doing A Policy-Oriented PhD

Steve Saideman has a good, short, thought on why doing a PhD is rarely a good idea for Canadians who want to get into policy work. Specifically, he writes:

In Canada, alas, there is not that much of a market for policy-oriented PhDs. We don’t have much in the way of think tanks, there are only a few govt jobs that either require PhDs or where the PhD gives one an advantage over an MA, and, the govt does not pay someone more if they have a PhD.

I concur that there are few places, including think tanks or civil society organizations, where you’re likely to find a job if you have a policy-related PhD. Moreover, when you do find one it can be challenging, if not impossible, to find promotion opportunities because the organizations tend to be so small.

That said, I do in fact think that doing a policy-related PhD can sometimes be helpful if you stay pretty applied in your outputs while pursuing your degree. In my case, I spent a lot of time during my PhD on many of the same topics that I still focus on, today, and can command a premium in consulting rates and seniority for other positions because I’ve been doing applied policy work for about 15 years now, inclusive of my time in my PhD. I, also, developed a lot of skills in my PhD—and in particular the ability to ask and assess good questions, know how questions or policy issues had been previously answered and to what effect, and a reflexive or historical thinking capacity I lacked previously—that are all helpful soft skills in actually doing policy work. Moreover, being able to study policy and politics, and basically act as an independent agent for the time of my PhD, meant I had a much better sense of what I thought about issues, why, and how to see them put into practice than I would have gained with just a master’s degree.

Does that mean I’d recommend doing a PhD? Well…no. There are huge opportunity costs you incur in doing them and, also, you can narrow you job market searches by appearing both over-educated and under-qualified. The benefits of holding a PhD tend to become more apparent after a few years in a job as opposed to being helpful in netting that first one out of school.

I don’t regret doing a PhD but, if someone is particularly committed to doing one, I think that they should hurl themselves into it with absolute abandon and treat it as a super-intensive 40-65 hour/week job, and be damn sure that you have a lot of non-academic outputs to prove to a future employer that you understand the world and not just academic journals. It’s hard work, which is sometimes rewarding, and there are arguably different (and less unpleasant) ways of getting to a relatively similar end point. But if someone is so motivated by a hard question that they’d be doing the research and thinking about it, regardless of whether they were in a PhD program? Then they might as well go and get the piece of paper while figuring out the answer.

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Photo Essay Photography Writing

First Snow of 2023 Photowalk

We got our first snow of the year on Sunday. I kept waiting for it to come and as soon as the snow started to fall I grabbed my Fuji X100F with a Cinebloom 10% attached and headed out to make some images.

I live in a densely populated section of Toronto. Notwithstanding the snow there were many people out and about when I first hit the streets. But it was as I moved to side streets, or into parts of the city that tend to be populated by tourists, that it was apparent that huge chunks of the city were largely depopulated as people decided to stay inside where it was warm and dry.

There were, of course, some people out even in the less populated parts of the city. They, however, tended to be trying to get out of the snow—which functionally turned into snow that was almost indistinguishable from rain towards the early evening—and generally wanted to just avoid getting wet or cold.

Somewhat surprisingly I saw almost no other photographers out and about. I’m sure they were there, somewhere. But, at the same time, I wonder how much the weather dissuaded them from getting out and shooting the streets or urban landscapes.

I will never be accused of babying my cameras. My Fuji X100F lacks the weatherproofing of the newest version and, so, when I’m out in the snow I tend to protectively place one hand over it’s screen and eyepiece, and keep the lens pointed downwards and slightly in towards my body. It doesn’t prevent all the precipitation from getting onto the camera but, along with brushing off water when it starts to gather on dials and such, has always seemed good enough to keep the equipment safe.

The mix of heavy coats and umbrellas is something that I’m always curious about, if only because I can’t recall ever seeing something similar while I was growing up or when I visit parts of the country (or world) that receive large volumes of snow. I don’t dispute the potential utility of an umbrella—it will, obviously, help to keep your head wet and my uncovered head certainly got soaked after 3-4 hours outside—but it always seems like an instrument that is out of place. Though they look very distinct in the snow and so I definitely took the chance to make images of people who were carrying them!

Though there were people out and about, and evidence in other cases of someone having been present recently, much of the city felt oddly solitary. When I make my photos I’m often trying to communicate a sense of, on the one hand, the press of other people around and upon us and, on the other, the loneliness or isolation experienced while being in these massive urban environments. Dismal weather almost always draws me to the latter and wanting to express how large our environments are and what they look like with few figures or, alternately, in the absence of humans entirely. What will the city look like when the humans are gone?

When I watched one of James Popsys’ videos recently he mentioned that, when taking his landscapes, he likes putting either a human or a human-made thing in his images. Doing so has the effect of communicating human presence and, often, what the natural environment looks in our absence. Human-made things, also, have the effect of drawing us into an image on the basis that we ‘see’ something of ourselves in the otherwise natural environment.

In an almost modernist way of thinking those solitary human-things have the effect of both showing the attempt to overcome, or start overcoming, nature while often simultaneously showcasing the majesty and longevity of nature against the transitory existence of human-made things. Or at least that’s how I see and study such images.

I don’t know how well I really captured ‘nature’ in my walk—save towards the very end of my walk—but Popsys’ words have resonated in my head for some time. For years when I’ve made images of the city it’s often been with a view that the humans are transitory; they move though the frame, they enter and exit the city, they live and die. The built infrastructure and the protected landscapes interspersed throughout the city, however, will (should?) persist for a far longer period of time. Yes, Toronto is a city undergoing profound construction but looking through historical photos of the city reveal that key things have remained for a century or more in spite of the changes.

Of course that isn’t to say that the old has stayed perfectly the same; the bridge I took the below image from is literally a bridge to nowhere that was disconnected from the surrounding roads in 1964. While there were plans to remove it, apparently it’s more affordable to do minimal maintenance on it than tear it down; it’s only a matter of time, though, until this economic calculus changes. The city keeps putting up fences and warnings to keep people off the bridge but there’s only been once in the past decade where the fences were intact and I was prevented from getting onto the bridge. In the summer you can regularly discover some pretty cool graffiti along its struts.

The bridge sits over the Don River and, looking south, you have a view of a highway that our municipal and provincial governments continue to pour money into, as well as industrial lands which have been in declining operation for a long time. While the specific buildings will almost certainly change—most likely to be replaced by condos—the character of the landscape should remain the same for decades insofar as the highway and walking path should persist. Though it may be that a similar image will only be accessible to those flying small drones when the economic calculus for maintaining the bridge changes.

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Links Writing

Economic Fundamentals Are Just That: Fundamental

In an opinion piece for the New York Time, Mihir A. Desai writes:

Embracing novelty and ambition in the face of huge problems is to be lauded, but the unhinged variety of these admirable traits that we have seen so much of in recent years is counterproductive. The fundamentals of business have not changed merely because of new technologies or low interest rates. The way to prosper is still by solving problems in new ways that sustainably deliver value to employees, capital providers and customers. Over-promising the scope of change created by technology and the possibilities of business and finance to a new generation will lead only to disaffection as these promises falter.1

A whole generation has seen exploding home prices, outrageous explosions in the costs of education, deeply challenging labour markets, and is facing down ecological catastrophe. These changes have taken place during a time of unprecedented financial gain for an older segment of the economy while the younger generations is, also, being routinely told that it is the first that will generally live a worse life than their parents.

So, in the face of ‘fundamentals’ falling apart a whole range of people—often though not always younger—have sought to find new ways of generating wealth in the face of the exploding challenges to living in Western society. Shockingly, the new companies that depend on exploiting regulatory blind spots to ‘find value’ (or, instead, just act illegally and dare governments to take the time and effort to rule that their operations are illegal) or that offer new lottery-like “currencies” have become popular as ways that may enable younger people to generate wealth and enjoy the (perceived) good life of their parents.

The fundamentals of businesses, and currencies and interest, however are just that: fundamental. The effect, however, is that while the promised wealth-generation opportunities may in fact be dead in the water, the explosion of costs and challenges to younger generations are not. Under-regulated capitalism has, also, become a fundamental of business with the effect that unless new regulations are developed and deployed we can expect further, and ongoing, attempts to evade the fundamentals of business if only so as to overcome the fundamental unfairness of capitalism and its logics of accumulation.

All of which is to say: sure, business fundamentals are just that. But an increasingly desperate and younger population will keep throwing fundamentals to the wind in the face of a business systems that is fundamentally and structurally designed to inhibit that same population from enjoying the Western ideal of the good life.

  1. 1: Emphasis not in original. ↩︎
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Links Writing

Social Networks, Social Media, and Design Affordances

Ian Bogost has a good piece in The Atlantic that recalls the trajectory of social networking services and their transformation into social media services. He distinguishes between the two thusly:

The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

I’m someone who obtains a vast amount of very valuable information from my social networks. People are always softly pushing information that is relevant to my specific interests, such as by RSS or through private email groups, with just enough extra stuff that I can learn about novel topics or issues. In all of these cases however I make the choice to interact with the content and in a pretty focused way. This approach is perhaps a bit more active than how Bogost frames social networks but is much closer to the earliest days of Web 2.0, prior to the advent of microblogging and image sharing becoming major things in my neck the Internet. Much of this information comes from people I have either strong or intermediate connections with.

Professionally, I have historically found Twitter to be a useful social media platform. I and other experts have used it to surface media and/or opinions that were meant to be helpful in better understandings parts of the world I engage with. This, of course, has changed for the worse in the past 2 months. Broadly, I and other experts have benefitted from the design affordances of the ‘megascale’ of Twitter.

Most social media, however, holds little or no value to me.1 And perhaps most dangerously even Twitter has the effect of sharpening language (gotta keep within those character or thread limits!) while also making it much harder, if not impossible, to find useful contributions at a later date in time. As experts have moved to Twitter and away from long-term content storage repositories (e.g., blogs, opinion articles, etc) their expertise has the effect of appearing briefly and then being lost to themselves as well as future audiences. Broadly, then, one question is what is the role of social media for professionals and experts who have a public communication role to their careers?

There is also some real value in social media platforms that move content quite quickly. I know for a fact that Twitter, as an example, is regularly useful for foreign policy observers who are trying to determine what is happening around the world. These observers are taking advantage of weak ties to obtain otherwise difficult to find information. Twitter is, also, helpful for crowdsourcing in the case of disasters. At the same time these networks can be, and have been, and are being used for harmful purposes. This includes targeted harassment, government abuse, and more. We often hear about these latter ills and, in response, some wish that very different or slower social media platforms existed on the presumption that they would reduce the harm while still enabling the good platforms. This is perhaps best captured by Bogost’s earlier article, “People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much,” where he writes:

Imagine if access and reach were limited too: mechanically rather than juridically, by default? What if, for example, you could post to Facebook only once a day, or week, or month? Or only to a certain number of people? Or what if, after an hour or a day, the post expired, Snapchat style? Or, after a certain number of views, or when it reached a certain geographic distance from its origins, it self-destructed? That wouldn’t stop bad actors from being bad, but it would reduce their ability to exude that badness into the public sphere.

However, in assessing the properties of networks/media systems designers should consider the respective technologies’ affordances and what they, and their users, really want or need. I don’t subscribe to the position that Twitter is Evil™ or that a ‘new Twitter’ needs to do away with all the affordances of the current platform.

Real good has come from the ability of different parties to exploit or benefit from virality. But that virality is not something that all persons should have to deal with if they don’t want to, and users of viral-enabled platforms should be protected by rigorous trust and safety policies and teams. (Twitter is clearly moving away from their already-insufficient efforts to protect their users and, so, any replacement virality-platform should start with trust and safety as a top priority ahead of almost anything else.)

The ‘solution’ to the ills of social media shouldn’t be to wistfully look back to the earliest era of Web 2.0, or the last breaths of Web 1.0, and say that we should be restricted to tool and service equivalents of those times. Social technologies should not be permanently halted in the time and template of Livejournal, Orkut, Google+, or Blogger.

First, because we enjoy a lot of modern affordances in our technology and likely won’t want to abandon them!

Second, because such call-backs are often to times when the social networks were far less diverse than the social media platforms today. We should be wary of seeking the civility of the past on the basis that much of that same perceived civility was premised on the exclusive and privileged nature of the social networks.

Third, it’s important for any and all who look for different social networks or social media platforms to recognize that the affordances they are seeking may not be the affordances that everyone is seeking. To use Twitter as just one example we regularly hear about how the platform is used by its Western users but comparatively little about how it’s used by Japanese users, who have prolifically adopted the platform. We should not over generalise our own experiences (or issues with) platforms and should instead adopt a more inclusive approach to understanding the benefits and drawbacks of a given platform’s affordances and capabilities.

I think that when imagining the ‘next’ iteration of social networks and social media it’s helpful to recognize that different kinds of networks will serve different functions. Not everything needs to operate at megascale. Also, though, we should learn lessons from the current social media platforms and design affordances that provide individuals and groups with the ability to express control over how their networks and media can be used. Tim Bray offers some of those suggestions in his proposals for updating Mastodon. Key, to my eye, are that content-licensing should be a default thing that is considered with code (and, unstated, law) being used to reinforce how individuals and communities permit their information to be accessed, used, collected, or disclosed.

We’re in the middle of yet another reflection period about what role(s) should social networks and social media play in Western society, as well as more generally around the world. Regulatory efforts are moving along and laws are being passed to rein in perceived issues linked with the companies operating the various networks. But there’s also real appetite to assess what should, and shouldn’t, be possible writ large on the contemporary and future social networks and social media platforms. We should lean into this in inclusive ways to develop the best possible policy. Doing anything else means we’ll just keep having the same debate ad infinitum.

  1. There’s lots of broader value: it can be useful economically for some individuals, enable speech outlets that are otherwise denied to individuals who are historically discriminated against, and serve as a medium for creative expression. ↩︎
Categories
Photo Essay Photography Writing

January 1st Graffiti Photowalk

I routinely try and take a bit of a longer photowalk at the start of each year. It’s an opportunity to stretch my legs some and a great way to start of the year while, also, getting a chance to document the city while it’s still recovering from New Years celebrations.

This year was no different, save that I ended up leaving for my walk later than intended and was drawn to a number of Toronto’s alleys throughout the evening.

While I did the majority of my shooting through the late afternoon and evening in monochrome, I couldn’t help by see how the positive film simulation in my Ricoh GRs would showcase the vibrant colours of graffiti under artificial lighting situations.

It was only once I’d brought the images home and looked at them that it became apparent that the majority of the photos were made from the same angle. I had no idea I was doing this at the time but, in hindsight, I definitely wish that I’d made images from wider variety of angles.

When I was wandering through some of the alleys I wished that there had been more people about to include in some of the images. Even a wisp of a figure would, I think, have added a bit of a haunting character to many of the photographs.

In their absence, however, I largely (though not completely) tried to channel Tatianna Hopper. She sometimes engages in a kind of street photography that simultaneously showcases the existence and absence of humans. Graffiti and human trash, or waste, expresses this concept to my mind.

In a number of alleys there were quasi-monstrous or demonic imagery. I see more and more of it around the city and have met the artists of some of it. The effort they’re putting in is amazing with really interesting effects; when shooting with humans in the frame and in monochrome, I find the graffiti adds an interesting graphic element and juxtaposition. Even on its own, however, the juxtaposition between colour and monochrome graffiti causes its own novel contrast.

Almost the entirety of 2022, and the tail end of 2021, saw me shoot 99% of my images in monochrome. I’m happy with the progress I’ve made on the street and can see the very real improvements in composition and ability to ‘see’ in monochrome. However I’m inspired by Alex Webb and Gustavo Minas’ ‘Maximum Shadow Minimal Light’. Both use shadow in colour photography and I’d like to develop similar skills . Maybe that means I’ll experiment some through the year in trying to translate what I’ve learned about light and shadows in monochrome images into colour photos!

Categories
Writing

Why Is(n’t) TikTok A National Security Risk?

Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

There have been grumblings about TikTok being a national security risk for many years and they’re getting louder with each passing month. Indeed, in the United States a bill has been presented to ban TikTok (“The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP ACT“) and a separate bill (“No TikTok on Government Devices Act“) has passed the Senate and would bar the application from being used on government devices. In Canada, the Prime Minister noted that the country’s signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment, is “watching very carefully.”

I recently provided commentary where I outlined some of the potential risks associated with TikTok and where it likely should fit into Canada’s national security priorities (spoiler: probably pretty low). Here I just want to expand on my comments a bit to provide some deeper context and reflections.

As with all things security-related you need to think through what assets you are attempting to protect, the sensitivity of what you’re trying to protect, and what measures are more or less likely to protect those assets. Further, in developing a protection strategy you need to think through how many resources you’re willing to invest to achieve the sought-after protection. This applies as much to national security policy makers as it does to individuals trying to secure devices or networks.

What Is Being Protected

Most public figures who talk about TikTok and national security are presently focused on one or two assets.

First, they worry that a large volume of data may be collected and used by Chinese government agencies, after these agencies receive it either voluntarily from TikTok or after compelling its disclosure. Commentators argue that Chinese companies are bound to obey the national security laws of China and, as such, may be forced to disclose data without any notice to users or non-Chinese government agencies. This information could be used to obtain information about specific individuals or communities, inclusive of what people are searching on the platform (e.g., medical information, financial information, sexual preference information), what they are themselves posting and could be embarrassing, or metadata which could be used for subsequent targeting.

Second, commentators are adopting a somewhat odious language of ‘cognitive warfare’ in talking about TikTok.1 The argument is that the Chinese government might compel the company to modify its algorithms so as to influence what people are seeing on the platform. The intent of this modification would be to influence political preferences or social and cultural perceptions. Some worry this kind of influence could guide whom individuals are more likely to vote for (e.g., you see a number of videos that directly or indirectly encourage you to support particular political parties), cause generalised apathy (e.g., you see videos that suggest that all parties are bad and none worth voting for), or enhance societal tensions (e.g., work to inflame partisanship and impair the functioning of otherwise moderate democracies). Or, as likely, a combination of each of these kinds of influence operations. Moreover, the TikTok algorithm could be modified by government compulsion to prioritise videos that praise some countries or that suppress videos which negatively portray other countries.

What Is the Sensitivity of the Assets?

When we consider the sensitivity of the information and data which is collected by TikTok it can be potentially high but, in practice, possesses differing sensitivities based on the person(s) in question. Research conducted by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that while TikTok does collect a significant volume of information, that volume largely parallels what Facebook or other Western companies collect. To put this slightly differently, a lot of information is collected and the sensitivity is associated with whom it belongs to, who may have access to it, and what those parties do with it.

When we consider who is using TikTok and having their information uploaded to the company’s servers, then, the question becomes whether there is a particular national security risk linked with this activity. While some individuals may potentially be targets based on their political, business, or civil society bonafides this will not be the case with all (or most) users. However, in even assessing the national security risks linked to individuals (or associated groups) it’s helpful to do a little more thinking.

First, the amount of information that is collected by TikTok, when merged with other data which could theoretically be collected using other signals intelligence methods (e.g., extracting metadata and select content from middle-boxes, Internet platforms, open-source locations, etc) could be very revealing. Five Eyes countries (i.e., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America) collect large volumes of metadata on vast swathes of the world’s populations in order to develop patterns of life which, when added together, can be deeply revelatory. When and how those countries’ intelligence agencies actually use the collected information varies and is kept very secretive. Generally, however, only a small subset of individuals whose information is collected and retained for any period of time have actions taken towards them. Nonetheless, we know that there is a genuine concern about information from private companies being obtained by intelligence services in the Five Eyes and it’s reasonable to be concerned that similar activities might be undertaken by Chinese intelligence services.

Second, the kinds of content information which are retained by TikTok could be embarrassing at a future time, or used by state agencies in ways that users would not expect or prefer. Imagine a situation where a young person says or does something on TikTok which is deeply offensive. Fast forward 3-4 years and their parents are diplomats or significant members of the business community, and that offensive content is used by Chinese security services to embarrass or otherwise inconvenience the parents. Such influence operations might impede Canada’s ability to conduct its diplomacy abroad or undermine the a business’s ability to prosper.

Third, the TikTok algorithm is not well understood. There is a risk that the Chinese government might compel ByteDance, and through them the TikTok platform, to modify algorithms to amplify some content and not others. It is hard to assess how ‘sensitive’ a population’s general sense of the world is but, broadly, if a surreptitious foreign influence operation occurred it might potentially affect how a population behaves or sees the world. To be clear this kind of shift in behaviour would not follow from a single video but from a concerted effort over time that shifted social perceptions amongst at least some distinct social communities. The sensitivity of the information used to identify videos to play, then, could be quite high across a substantial swathe of the population using the platform.

It’s important to recognise that in the aforementioned examples there is no evidence that ByteDance, which owns TikTok, has been compelled by the Chinese government to perform these activities. But these are the kinds of sensitivities that are linked to using TikTok and are popularly discussed.

What Should Be Done To Protect Assets?

The threats which are posed by TikTok are, at the moment, specious: it could be used for any number of things. Why people are concerned are linked less to the algorithm or data that is collected but, instead, to ByteDance being a Chinese company that might be influenced by the Chinese government to share data or undertake activities which are deleterious to Western countries’ interests.

Bluntly: the issue raised by TikTok is not necessarily linked to the platform itself but to the geopolitical struggles between China and other advanced economies throughout the world. We don’t have a TikTok problem per se but, instead, have a Chinese national security and foreign policy problem. TikTok is just a very narrow lens through which concerns and fears are being channelled.

So in the absence of obvious and deliberate harmful activities being undertaken by ByteDance and TikTok at the behest of the Chinese government what should be done? At the outset it’s worth recognising that many of the concerns expressed by politicians–and especially those linked to surreptitious influence operations–would already run afoul of Canadian law. The CSIS Act bars clandestine foreign intelligence operations which are regarded as threatening the security of Canada. Specifically, threats to the security of Canada means:

(a) espionage or sabotage that is against Canada or is detrimental to the interests of Canada or activities directed toward or in support of such espionage or sabotage,

(b) foreign influenced activities within or relating to Canada that are detrimental to the interests of Canada and are clandestine or deceptive or involve a threat to any person,

(c) activities within or relating to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state, and

(d) activities directed toward undermining by covert unlawful acts, or directed toward or intended ultimately to lead to the destruction or overthrow by violence of, the constitutionally established system of government in Canada,

CSIS is authorised to undertake measures which would reduce the threats to the security of Canada, perhaps in partnership with the Communications Security Establishment, should such a threat be identified and a warrant obtained from the federal court.

On the whole a general ban on TikTok is almost certainly disproportionate and unreasonable at this point in time. There is no evidence of harm. There is no evidence of influence by the Chinese government. Rather than banning the platform generally I think that more focused legislation or policy could make sense.

First, I think that legislation or (preferably) policies precluding at least some members of government and senior civil servants from using TikTok has some merit. In these cases a risk analysis should be conducted to determine if collected information would undermine the Government of Canada’s ability to secure confidential information or if the collected information could be used for intelligence operations against the government officials. Advice might, also, be issued by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service so that private organisations are aware of their risks. In exceptional situations some kind of security requirements might also be imposed on private organisations and individuals, such as those who are involved in especially sensitive roles managing critical infrastructure systems. Ultimately, I suspect the number of people who should fall under this ban would, and should, be pretty small.

Second, what makes sense is legislation that requires social media companies writ large–not just TikTok–to make their algorithms and data flows legible to regulators. Moreover, individual users should be able to learn, and understand, why certain content is being prioritised or shown to them. Should platforms decline to comply with such a the law then sanctions may be merited. Similarly, should algorithmic legibility showcase that platforms are being manipulated or developed in ways that deliberately undermine social cohesion then some sanctions might be merited, though with the caveat that “social cohesion” should be understood as referring to platforms being deliberately designed to incite rage or other strong emotions with the effect of continually, and artificially, weakening social cohesion and amplifying social cleavages. The term should not, however, be seen as a kind of code for creating exclusionary social environments where underprivileged groups continue to be treated in discriminatory ways.

So Is TikTok ‘Dangerous’ From A National Security Perspective?

Based on open source information2 there is no reason to think that TikTok is currently a national security threat. Are there any risks associated with the platform? Sure, but they need to be juxtaposed against equivalent or more serious threats and priorities. We only have so many resources to direct towards the growing legion of legitimate national security risks and issues; funnelling a limited set of resources towards TikTok may not be the best kind of prioritisation.

Consider that while the Chinese government could compel TikTok to disclose information about its users to intelligence and security services…the same government could also use business cutouts and purchase much of the same information from data brokers operating in the United States and other jurisdictions. There would be no need to secretly force a company to do something when, instead, it could just lawfully acquire equivalent (or more extensive!) information. This is a pressing and real national security (and privacy!) issue and is deserving of legislative scrutiny and attention.

Further, while there is a risk that TikTok could be used to manipulate social values…the same is true of other social networking services. Indeed, academic and journalistic research over the past 5-7 years has drawn attention to how popular social media services are designed to deliver dopamine hits and keep us on them. We know that various private companies and public organisations around the world work tirelessly to ‘hack’ those algorithms and manipulate social values. Of course this broader manipulation doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care but, also, makes clear that TikTok isn’t the sole vector of these efforts. Moreover, there are real questions about the how well social influence campaigns work: do they influence behaviour–are they supplying change?–or is the efficaciousness of any campaign representative of an attentive and interested pre-existing audience–is demand for the content the problem?

The nice thing about banning, blocking, or censoring material, or undertaking some other kind of binary decision, is that you feel like you’ve done something. Bans, blocks, and censors are typically designed for a black and white world. We, however, live in a world that is actually shrouded in greys. We only have so much legislative time, so much policy capacity, so much enforcement ability: it should all be directed efficiently to understanding, appreciating, and addressing the fulness of the challenges facing states and society. This time and effort should not be spent on performative politics that is great for providing a dopamine hit but which fails to address the real underlying issues.

  1. I have previously talked about the broader risks of correlating national security and information security. ↩︎
  2. Open source information means information which you or I can find, and read, without requiring a security clearance. ↩︎
Categories
Photo Essay Photography Writing

Which Photo (Or Three…) Best Represents 2022?

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part | Excluded Audience | Amour by Christopher Parsons

Neale James, host of the Photowalk, challenged the ‘Extra Milers’ to look through our pictures and find one (or three…) which really spoke to our 2022. It could be a best photograph, or one that captures some memory or another, or really anything…the question was deliberately left pretty open to interpretation.

It served as a good experience for me. I went back through the past 11 months of images and, in the process, was reminded of numerous photos and experiences I’d forgotten about.

The first image (“‘til Pandemic Does Us Part”) speaks to how seriously some were still taking the pandemic much earlier in the year.

‘Til Pandemic Does Us Part by Christopher Parsons

The second (“Excluded Audience”) is very similar to an image I made in early 2020 which defined that stage of the pandemic in Toronto for me. “Excluded Audience” is meant to call back to that image and showcase that while things were going back to normal as the year progressed, that normal isn’t necessarily positive for everyone in the city. I’ve also included that reference image (“Down But Not Out”) below, after the set, just to indicate what I was trying to call back to.

Excluded Audience by Christopher Parsons

The final image of the year in this set (“Amour”) is meant to document how things are, today, with those in love able to see and hold one another amongst crowds once more. As a set, I think they have a symmetry in story and composition across them.

Amour by Christopher Parsons

And, finally, the reference image really just captures what Toronto was like in the early days of the pandemic when the entire downtown core had just shut down in its entirety.

Down But Not Out by Christopher Parsons

In terms of process for selecting photos, most years I start by reviewing images that I posted to social media that year, which in 2022 has been Glass. From the 300-365 images I work down to 30 images or so that best tell the story of the year. However, using this process I miss some photos that I really like but haven’t uploaded and, at the same time, include some images in the sort that I’ve somewhat fallen out of favour with since posting them.

All of which is to say: I think that going through and taking the time to review/re-examine all the images we’ve taken over a year is a splendid exercise, and especially because there’s a bit of time between when an image was captured and now. For me, at least, this helped to surface work that resonates more today than I think that it did when I first made it.

How do you go through and review your photos annually? What’s your best photo or photo set of the year, and what’s the story behind them?

Categories
Writing

Apple To More Widely Encrypt iCloud Data

Photo by Kartikey Das on Pexels.com

Apple has announced it will begin rolling out new data security protections for Americans by end of 2022, and the rest of the world in 2023. This is a big deal.

One of the biggest, and most serious, gaping holes in the protections that Apple has provided to its users is linked to iCloud. Specifically, while a subset of information has been encrypted such that Apple couldn’t access or disclose the plaintext of communications or content (e.g., Health information, encrypted Apple Notes, etc) the company did not encrypt device backups, message backups, notes generally, iCloud contents, Photos, and more. The result is that third-parties could either compel Apple to disclose information (e.g., by way of warrant) or otherwise subvert Apple’s protections to access stored data (e.g., targeted attacks). Apple’s new security protections will expand the categories of protected data from 141 to 23.

I am very supportive of Apple’s decision and frankly congratulate them on the very real courage that it takes to implement something like this. It is:

  • courageous technically, insofar as this is a challenging thing to pull off at the scale at which Apple operates
  • courageous from a business perspective, insofar as it raises the prospect of unhappy customers should they lose access to their data and Apple unable to assist them
  • courageous legally, insofar as it’s going to inspire a lot of frustration and upset by law enforcement and government agencies around the world

It’ll be absolutely critical to observe how quickly, and how broadly, Apple extends its new security capacities and whether countries are able to pressure Apple to either not deploy them for their residents or roll them back in certain situations. Either way, Apple routinely sets the standard on consumer privacy protections; others in the industry will now be inevitably compared to Apple as either meeting the new standard or failing their own customers in one way or another.

From a Canadian, Australia, or British government point of view, I suspect that Apple’s decision will infuriate law enforcement and security agencies who had placed their hopes on CLOUD Act bilateral agreements to get access to corporate data, such as that held by Apple. Under a CLOUD bilateral British authorities could, as an example, directly serve a judicially authorised order to Apple about a British resident, to get Apple to disclose information back to the British authorities without having to deal with American authorities. It promised to substantially improve the speed at which countries with bilateral agreements could obtain electronic evidence. Now, it would seem, Apple will largely be unable to assist law enforcement and security agencies when it comes to Apple users who have voluntarily enabled heightened data protections. Apple’s decision will, almost certainly, further inspire governments around the world to double down on their efforts to advance anti-encryption legislation and pass such legislation into law.

Notwithstanding the inevitable government gnashing of teeth, Apple’s approach will represent one of the biggest (voluntary) increases in privacy protection for global users since WhatsApp adopted Signal’s underlying encryption protocols. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people who enable the new data protection will be much safer and more secure in how their data is stored while simultaneously restricting who can access that data without individuals’ own knowledge.

In a world where ‘high-profile’ targets are just people who are social influencers on social media, there are a lot of people who stand to benefit from Apple’s courageous move. I only hope that other companies, such as Google, are courageous enough to follow Apple at some point in the near future.

  1. really, 13, given the issue of iMessage backups being accessible to Apple ↩︎