Everybody has a camera…well, almost everybody. Thanks to cell phones, we can be recorded in still or video formats almost every second of the day. We are our own Big Brother.  So much so, in fact, that it is hard to muster too much fright and indignation over increasing use of public cameras by the government. Boston police, for example, now have immediate access to street video of shootings, robberies, and homicides on many city streets, and use real time images to send information about the suspects and crimes to responding officers.

Predictably, the ACLU is sounding alarms about this system and similar ones in other cities. Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe that the public should be concerned. “While all of us want to be safe, I think it’s important that the public ask some questions about the extent to which this kind of surveillance is becoming pervasive and whether there is any independent oversight to this extensive surveillance, which we know is prone to abuse,’’ Rose said.

Let us assess the public camera situation. In an era when everybody has cell phones with cameras on their person, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when one is in public. Nostalgia for privacy, perhaps, but no reasonable expectations of it. The ACLU’s concern about the city’s use of cameras is quaint, since at least it is clear what the city is supposed to use the surveillance for, unlike the far more pervasive private videos. This isn’t a tough trade-off, is it? I’ll risk a police officer catching me on a monitor picking my nose if it discourages a mugger from bashing in my skull. As with the similarly controversial traffic cameras, this is a utilitarian slam-dunk. Public conduct is not private; all cameras do is make the distinction vivid. I do not even believe that there is an ethical obligation for the government to inform citizens that they are being filmed for legitimate law enforcement purposes (allowing criminals to restrict their law-breaking to uncovered areas) , or that such filming requires specific individual consent. Electing a government that installs such a system is consent enough; if you don’t like it, withdraw the consent and vote in new leaders. I doubt, however, that the street criminal and embarrassed nose-picker vote is large enough to overcome the vote of grateful non-victims of crime.

Private cameras pose a different problem. The human rights website the Hub notes the tension between the value of private videos catching and publicizing public  human rights violations, and the potential breaches of the safety, dignity and consent of those filmed. That is a true ethical conflict, and it goes beyond the Hub’s stated concern, which is the publicizing of the victims without their consent. What about fairness to the alleged perpetrators? It is a good bet that the Rodney King video, had it been taken in the time of YouTube, would have only shown the police clubbing King, and not King’s earlier actions that showed that he was at least partially culpable in his own plight. The government and the police are accountable for the misuse of their videos, but everyone is at the mercy of the amateur cell-phone photographers, who are often more concerned with YouTube immortality than fairness. There is no reason to trust them, because “they” could be anyone.

Nobody who commits a crime on the street should be able to complain that their privacy was violated by the police. There is no reason, however, to trust an amateur’s judgment regarding whether there has been a crime or not. A cell-phone witness who films a suspicious event should turn the video over to authorities. Putting it on YouTube? Sorry; that’s unethical. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but I believe the ethical formula is this: one consents to being seen in public, and by being seen, one consents to photographic records created by someone who is doing the seeing. One does not consent, however, to having one’s actions and likeness viewed by millions of others for entertainment, titillation, ridicule, disapproval, or the benefit of the person making the video. If everyone who appears on a video knowingly consents to being turned into a YouTube clip, then posting it is ethical. Otherwise, it is not. Which means, practically speaking, that such posting will virtually always be unethical.

If it makes the robbers and murderers caught on tape by the Boston police feel any better, I think it’s unethical to post their videos on YouTube too.

[Ethics Alarms thanks Gabe Goldberg for suggesting this topic and the Hub link. Jack Marshall humbly apologizes for referring to his friend as “Gabe Gross” in an earlier version of this post. Gabe Gross is a good fielding outfielder for the Oakland A’s. It’s Spring Training time. Part of my brain is with the Boston Red Sox.]