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Comment by rowyourboat | Hacker News Reader

> If you voluntarily walk into someones private shop, can you demand that the shop owner doesn't catalog that event?

Unless you know the shop owner, you would not be personally identified, and yes, in fact, it would be illegal to use technology that personally identifies you when you walk into a shop. The event that _somebody_ walked into a shop can be recorded.

> Is there an expectation of privacy while walking on the public street?

Insofar as no records are made of your movement, yes. It is illegal to record somebody else's presence in a public space, although fair use examples exist (in the background of a personal vacation photo, for example). There are zones with video surveillance, but those are generally clearly marked. The general expectation is that nobody who does not happen to be in the same place as you at the same time knows that you have been there.

That is, in very broad strokes, the current legal situation in Germany pre-GDPR.

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> Unless you know the shop owner, you would not be personally identified, and yes, in fact, it would be illegal to use technology that personally identifies you when you walk into a shop.

German law has often seemed silly to me, and this isn't an exception.

The principle is that people have the expectation that their movements in the public space aren't recorded. Anything that violates that expectation is problematic to straight illegal. I don't find that silly, quite the contrary.

I guess software that simply displays your name on a screen, but does not (identifiably) record that fact would be fine, though that would pose the question how the software would connect your face with your name - you would probably have to volunteer a photo for that to work.

Can shop owners in Germany not have surveillance cameras in their buildings? Unless you walk into the grocery store with a mask, you would then be on video and identifiable in some way.

In the US and the UK, almost every business of any value is recording you from the moment you walk in. At the very least, they likely have a camera on the cash register to deter theft. The UK is widely known to record public spaces with some videos being made of following people in London for miles.

Outside of your own home, privacy regarding your physical person is basically nonexistent except in a bathroom stall. In the US, it’s 100% legal to take photos of other people in public without their permission.

I think the barrier to provide the maximum amount of privacy for citizens in every aspect of their lives is too high in most of the modern world. There is simply no precedent for limiting the amount of data that is collected in public that will sway legislators across the world.

> Can shop owners in Germany not have surveillance cameras in their buildings? Unless you walk into the grocery store with a mask, you would then be on video and identifiable in some way.

They can, but you have to be informed of that fact. The business may only use the recordings to investigate a crime, it may not use it for anything else, and they have to be erased after a certain amount of time.

A country that's had both the Gestapo and the Stasi deserves some understanding about laws to prevent privacy infringement. It's not surprising that they're worried about it: they've seen what it can do.

It is illegal to record somebody else's presence in a public space...

So, I can't take a snapshot in a restaurant or on the street if anybody is visible in the background?

Read the sentence you half-quoted a little bit further.

You can, as I pointed out in that very sentence:

> It is illegal to record somebody else's presence in a public space, although fair use examples exist (in the background of a personal vacation photo, for example)

If you were to publish that photo, however, you have to get all identifiable persons' permission or make them unrecognizable. That extends to other information usable to identify somebody such as a readable license plate.

Given that the quoted sentence ends with _...although fair use examples exist (in the background of a personal vacation photo, for example)._ I assume your scenario would fall under this

Doesn't anyone who walks into a shop more than once 'know' the staff? I recognised repeat customers when I worked in retail, even though I didn't know their names, and customised my service to them (e.g "how's the XXX you bought last time?"). That's illegal in Germany?

No, of course not. It's about making records.

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