User:Elominius/Essay on video recording on school trips

Back when my school class went on tour, there have been complaints by few students who happened to appear on photographs and videos taken by other students, though most students were not bothered. The class mate who complained the most by a wide margin was a girl named J., who even demanded that I delete every photo she even marginally appeared on, since she considered it a "privacy violation". I partially honoured the request by letting her delete the photos where her face is recognizable.


 * Is photography and video recording on school trips a "privacy violation"?

Everyone who attends a class trip must expect that people will take pictures and record videos, and that their faces will occasionally appear on those pictures and videos.

A school trip occurs rarely, making it a special event. For all the money and effort put into organizing a school trip, one might want to have the memories on solid watchable video, not just stored on neurons inside brains.

What is the worst that can happen from video footage with visible faces? Anyone who behaved appropriately can not be humiliated through those videos. And even if someone had the idea of publishing those videos online, likelier than not they would get 3 views and be forgotten about. In fact, fewer people would see it than people saw my classmates walking in the public locations we visited. The same people who complain "privacy violation" at photographers and filmers on school trips are the people who in a decade will say "man, I wish video footage from that beautiful day existed".

Hard proof like video recordings are far more visible and vivid than memories stored as chemicals and neurons in the brain. It is like a portal to the past. The closest thing to a time machine. And people are simply part of the image of a school trip. Without the people who attended the trip, the video footage would be generic and replaceable.

What makes it hypocritical is that the same girl had uploaded photos of herself barely clothed onto her public Instagram profile, where she has over 2000 followers. Those sexually provocative photos are still on air as of writing, though they are in no way special due to the abundance of similar photos on that platform. The hypocrisy is that she does not mind exposing herself barely clothed on social media, while being bothered by obscurely appearing in the corner of some of my photos on a school trip.

My school trip photographs and recordings were just for myself, to save the memories, not to be distributed online, whereas her Instagram postings have been seen by thousands.

Even if it were detrimental for her to appear on any of my photos, whether she appears on one or a thousand pictures would be indifferent.

Me and the other classmates who filmed a lot did not violate any personality rights. Anyone who participates in a school trip needs to accept the taking of photos and videos, and J. is the least person to complain about my photography, given her activity on Instagram.