Last Tuesday, a woman on the L train in Chicago was eating a sleeve of Ritz crackers. Nothing remarkable. Tired face, work bag between her knees, crumbs on her jacket. Someone across the aisle held a phone at that careful angle, the one that pretends to be texting. I watched the screen. They were recording her. This is what passes for content now, and I think it is making us worse.
Filming strangers in public without their consent has become so routine that questioning it sounds quaint. The legal right to record in shared spaces is real. I grant that. First Amendment auditors have used cameras to expose genuine police misconduct, and citizen journalism has broken stories that institutional media missed or ignored. But the vast majority of what fills TikTok and YouTube shorts is not journalism. It is not accountability. It is a woman eating crackers on a train, turned into a punchline she will never know about until a coworker sends her the link.
The Craft of Cruelty
I spend my life paying attention to how things are made. The care behind a dish, a song, a room. What strikes me about the culture of public filming is how careless it is. There is no craft here. A man in Greater Manchester was arrested in 2024 on suspicion of stalking and harassment after filming women at social events and uploading the footage. The arrest came not from a single act but from the cumulative weight of his conduct. That distinction matters. The law caught up to him only because he was prolific enough to cross a line that barely exists.
The UK's Protection from Harassment Act can address repeated, targeted filming. But one-off recordings, the kind that go viral and ruin someone's week or month or year, fall through every crack. Experts have called for a new statutory framework specifically addressing non-consensual filming and publication in public spaces. They are right. The patchwork of privacy law, GDPR provisions, and harassment statutes was not built for a world where anyone with a phone can broadcast a stranger's worst moment to 3 million people before lunch.
In Maryland this month, James Mulhern III was charged with sex abuse of a minor after secretly filming students in a high school changing room. That is a crime with clear legal consequences. But the cultural permission structure that normalizes pointing cameras at people who have not consented, that treats public space as a content farm, creates a gradient. At one end, a journalist films a protest. At the other, a predator films children. The middle is vast, and we have almost no rules for it.
Dignity Is Not a Loophole
I keep returning to the sensory reality of being watched. The prickle on your neck in a coffee shop. The way your posture changes when you notice a lens. Public space is supposed to be shared, not surveilled by freelance content creators hoping your bad day goes viral. The argument that targeted enforcement against provable harassment is sufficient sounds reasonable until you remember that the woman on the L train will never file a complaint. She does not even know she was filmed.
The camera culture, as one legal commentator put it, has "digitised and monetised harassment." That phrase is precise. The monetization is the part that should alarm us most. Revenue models built on humiliating strangers are not a side effect of free expression. They are an industry.
Yes, any new legal framework risks chilling legitimate documentation of public life. Fair point. But the current vacuum chills something more important: the willingness of ordinary people to exist in public without performing for an audience they never chose. A 2024 UK court precedent awarded a claimant £7,800 in damages after CCTV footage violated his privacy in a public space. That number is small. The principle is not.
Legislators in the UK and the U.S. should stop pretending that existing harassment law covers this. It does not. We need statutes that specifically address the non-consensual filming and publication of identifiable individuals for commercial or viral distribution. The standard should not be whether a single recording constitutes criminal harassment. It should be whether a person's likeness was taken and broadcast without their knowledge for someone else's profit or amusement.
That woman on the L train deserved her crackers in peace. Most of us just want the same.
