|
As most of us will have experienced, taking images (still or moving) of students or anyone else on campus is governed by SFU policies and is supposed to involve written or oral consent or a ‘work-around’ like signage or a lanyard worn by the photographer. All
employees of the university, as far as I know, are required to comply with the university’s rules and follow its advice about capturing images of people.
Students are a major concern in these policies, to the extent that the instructions about image capture are under the purview of the Manager, Multimedia and Internal Communications in Student Services: https://www.sfu.ca/students/photo-video-permissions.html
Given that: (1) most TSSU members are students; & (2) these rules presumably include employees of the university who are hired as contractors, it raises the question of whether this security firm is contravening the university's own policies in this regard?
For example, the following wording from the webpage above: “When in doubt, avoid capturing the image of an identifiable person without their consent. Consider the university as private property, where campus community members should have a reasonable
expectation of privacy in their daily routine …"
I’m not a lawyer or an expert on SFU policies, but this was what struck me immediately. Seems threatening, discomforting, and ‘creepy’. All the sorts of things that SFU, with a duty of care for its students should be working to mitigate. (In fact, the
PowerPoint presentation explaining the policies and best practice on the above webpage even uses the word creepy — see slide 30: https://www.sfu.ca/content/sfu/students/photo-video-permissions/_jcr_content/main_content/download/file.res/Presentation-Multimedia%20Copyright%20Privacy%202017rvsd-lr.pdf)
Eugene
_______________________________________________________
Eugene McCann (he/him/his) Professor, Geography Associate Faculty, Sociology & Anthropology Simon Fraser University Managing Editor, EPC: Politics & Space https://journals.sagepub.com/home/epc Minor Revisions podcast https://journals.sagepub.com/page/epc/collections/podcasts Personal website: https://emccanngeog.wordpress.com Contact information: Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada Unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Email: emccann@sfu.ca; Phone: 778-782-3321 |