So far, the only source of information about this event seems to be this one article, which went out and got quoted, paraphrased and summarised elsewhere online.
Nowhere does the article tell EXACTLY what kind of permissions did the guy get, exactly what did he tell the store employees he was going to do, or how. It is quite possible that he DID tell them that the pictures he was going to take were going to be taken using a software programme installed on those Macs. Apple store does NOT prohibit customers from downloading and installing various software on store Macs. There are plenty of store computers with Skype, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ooVoo and other stuff installed on store Macs at any given time (except early morning, when they are fresh from being re-imaged by the employees).
With respect to surreptitious picture taking, the key legal test is reasonable expectation of privacy. Legal precedent says that customers in a store cannot reasonably expect privacy in that regard. Other legal precedents also say that even tough a store may be private property, for these types of purposes (taking candid photos), they are legally considered public places.
In other words, an experienced attorney may be able to successfully defend against charges of spying (photography without consent).
With respect to putting those pictures to the artist’s own computer via internet, using Apple’s store computers, that might be much more difficult to defend, although probably not completely impossible.
And the final word: if we disregard, for the moment, legal implications and possible consequences, and focus on the actual intent of this person, we can clearly see that the intent was not malicious, nefarious or sinister. The guy got an interesting idea: how do people’s faces look when they interact with a computer in a computer store. He tried to figure out how to answer that question through an art project. Based on the little information available in the articles, he apparently has a very limited grasp of legal limitations with respect to the ways he could have executed his little project. By asking people around (store employees to allow photographing, customers to agree to be photographed), he was (again, apparently, according to the article) satisfied that he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Most of us know that you can easily break a law or two even if you aren’t doing anything wrong; right or wrong is always relative, and dependent on the perception of an individual, group or society, while laws are always much more precisely defined, and often times, much more abstract.
Article source: http://macdailynews.com/2011/07/08/artist-investigated-over-photo-snapping-spyware-in-apple-retail-stores/
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