What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the entire world? 2025-09-29 I am very much enjoying my newly-resurrected hobby of Airsoft. Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people, in pursuit of a contrived-to-be-fun mission, turns out to be, well, fun. I have also had to accept that, for some other players, part of that fun comes from making videos of their game days, and uploading them to YouTube. They often have quite impressive setups, with multiple cameras - head, rear-facing from barrel of weapon, and scope cam - and clearly put time, money, and effort into doing this. Great! Just like someone taking photos on their holidays, or when out and about, I can see the fun in it. It is the “non-consensually publishing it online for the world to see” aspect which bugs me a bit. In the handful of games that I have played, no-one has ever asked about consent of other participants. There has been no “put on this purple lanyard if you don’t want to be included in the public version of the video” rule, which I’ve seen work pretty well at conferences I have attended (even if it is opt-out rather than consent). I could, I suppose, ask each person that I see with a camera “would you mind not including me in anything you upload, please?”. And, since everyone with whom I’ve spoken at games, so far anyway, has been perfectly pleasant and friendly, I’d be hopeful that they would at least consider my request. I have not done this. The impression I get is that this is just seen as part and parcel of the hobby: by running around in the woods of northern Newbury on a Sunday morning, I need to accept that I may well appear on YouTube, for the world to see. I don’t love it, but it is not a big enough deal for me to make a fuss. Other notes I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”. This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing. In any case, here, the issue is somewhat different, since it is a private site, where people engage in private activity (a hobby). But then I’ve seen the same at (private) conferences, with people saying “Of course I’m free to take photos of identifiable individuals without their consent and publish them online”. Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me. This isn’t about what is legal (although, in some cases, claims of legality may be poorly conceived), but around my own perceptions of a private life, and a dislike for the fact that, just because one can publish such things, that one should.