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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

The “expectation of privacy” isn’t about what you would expect regular people to do. It’s about what you would expect malicious actors like spies (or just private detectives hired to tail you) to do. You wouldn’t expect to be safe from a detective with a boom mic in the public square—therefore, the square is not a place where you should be having private conversations (even whispered) if you have anything to hide.

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> The “expectation of privacy” isn’t about what you would expect regular people to do. It’s about what you would expect malicious actors like spies (or just private detectives hired to tail you) to do.

This is almost the opposite of how “expectation of privacy” is defined in the legal sense and used in court. Where did you get your idea from? Are you thinking of that term in a security context rather than legal?

For one, you’re defining the term with respect to the spies and not the public, and for two the idea is not whether someone could spy on you given the chance, the whole idea is that when you do something in private, you can reasonably expect it to stay private and that expectation should potentially be protected by law.

“Expectation of privacy must be reasonable, in the sense that society in general would recognize it as such”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy

I wouldn't expect to be safe from that detective in my own house, in a sealed room! But I certainly have an expectation of privacy there.

You should expect to be safe from that detective in your own house, because we’ve drawn a very clear distinction—that detective is breaking the law by snooping on what you do in your own private residence. If the police wanted to discover what you were doing in your own home, they’d have to get a warrant in order to not be breaking the law by doing that (“warrant” literally being defined as “a writ making something that’s normally illegal to do, temporarily not, for you, in this situation.”)

Whereas, neither the private detective, nor the police, would be breaking the law by snooping on you in the public square. So either/both would feel empowered to do so, because society does not think such an action is worthy of punishment.

That's pretty circular logic. There are feedback loops between expectations and law, but that doesn't mean the status quo is always correct. The nature of how much surveillance one person can perform has increased by many orders of magnitude. It's worth rethinking how we limit public surveillance.

A better metaphor I've found is a telegram. You dictate your message and someone else inputs the message and someone on the other end transcribes the message and delivers it to the recipient. Is there an expectation that only you and the recipient will know what the message is? No. There are at least two other individuals involved there.

I've honest never understood how the expectation of privacy arose from using Facebook. You are literally sending your information to Facebook.

If anyone is at fault here, it's browser makers who enable sending your data to Facebook. Facebook isn't reaching into your computer "stealing" your data. It's recording what is being sent. Obviously talking about the web site here.

I would argue that's exactly what the expectation of privacy is. Malicious actors on the other hand are the reality of privacy.

but on the other hand mob guys when they wanted to discuss something private would often walk and talk, because walking down the street having a private conversation is better than doing it in your office that the FBI has tapped.

At times, a public square is the best place to have a private/secret talk.

Except their point is that the public square is not. "Most convenient" is not the same as best wrt private conversations.

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