A young digital artist secretly recorded shoppers peering into computers at New York Apple stores
A sneaky act of experimental Apple store art led the Secret Service to raid a young Brooklyn resident's apartment this morning. Kyle McDonald, a 25-year-old digital artist, secretly snapped a thousand images of unsuspecting Apple store shoppers for a project that sought to explore "how we stare at computers and how computers see us." Using his own custom spyware, McDonald secretly documented exactly that over the course of 3 days in June.
To pull the feat off, McDonald installed the hidden program onto Macs at New York's 14th street and Soho Apple stores. The stealth software, which made use of the computer's built-in cameras, took photographs of unaware New Yorker shoppers as they peered into the seeming abyss of the computer screen. He collected the photos, which were automatically transmitted to a private server, but had to reinstall the software in person each morning during the experiment.
Earlier this week, a video that documents his undertaking in full went live on Vimeo, followed by a Tumblr blog also appropriately entitled "People Staring at Computers." McDonald says he would honor individual requests to remove the photos, though his Twitter account suggests that the federal raid hasn't dampened his commitment to the feat of public art.
The stealthy undertaking resulted in the confiscation of McDonald's two computers, his iPod, and some other storage devices, but it isn't yet clear if the McDonald was actually in violation of any laws. While the Secret Service warrant cited 'computer fraud' as the cause for the raid, the clever digital artist reportedly asked an Apple security worker for permission to take photos in the store — though the guard probably couldn't have imagined the scope of what he had in mind.
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