[1] Note that by "public" I mean cameras facing streets, sidewalks, etc. I can always choose not to go into a store if I don't want to be on its cameras.
I would also feel uncomfortable if they had street corners full of watchmen hired to just stare and keep track of everyone. I would feel uncomfortable at work if they had people or cameras positioned to stare over my shoulder. It's not the camera, it's the surveillance.
And by that token, I'm ok with street photography. I love street photography. It's completely different from surveillance.
I consider the human eye a camera. It also saves videos in a storage medium that doesn't permit deletion. I don't distinguish between a silicon-based camera and a carbon-based camera. To me they're just different rows of the periodic table.
In fact I even hope to think that one day silicon-based cameras can be used to restore vision to carbon-based beings that have non-functioning carbon-based cameras. To that extent even if I have functioning carbon-based cameras, having a silicon-based camera attached to my body is just an extension of my body and you most certainly do not have the right of access to the memories it records, regardless of whether those memories are stored in neurons or in an SD card (even that detail is not your right to know; I could have had a flash memory implant in my brain and it would be a HIPAA violation if you demanded to know what implants I have).
To ban silicon-based cameras is a gross ADA violation. To demand to know exactly by what mechanism videos are stored is a HIPAA violation. If you want to ban recording you might as well blindfold everyone while you're at it.
We don’t have cameras and flash embedded in ourselves, someone’s recollections are not the same as an video file in terms of evidence, and there’s a substantial difference between someone actively on the street corner watching and security camera you can set and forget which will record 24/7.
Maybe you aren't, that doesn't mean everyone chooses that lifestyle or should be forced into that mode of thinking.
I for one choose to think in terms of the future.
> We don’t have cameras and flash embedded in ourselves
Oh you bet I do happen to have a piece of flash storage embedded in my body, for a reason I choose to not disclose here. Although mine is not wired into an imaging device, it's only a matter of time before someone else's flash implant IS wired to an imaging device, and they have every right to.
Personally I see little to no difference between human eyes and film eyes when one is standing in the middle of the street 50 years ago, let alone now with some implied cybernetics that make the difference actually zero.
If the argument is that a snapshot can not be observed as a collection of light wa eves hitting cellulose, or a digital sesnsor then one has to ask the question if allow the receptors in the human eyeball to detect the reflections of light is acceptable either.
For example, if surveying a person in the 1970s cost $300k per year to have them constantly followed, the cops needed few other limits as the cost alone means it won’t become pervasive.
But if you can get almost the same surveillance in 2021 for $10 per annum, nothing qualitative has changed - but the primary control on overreach has gone.
The key distinction is that the human eye and its storage system doesn't meaningfully support duplication and distribution of the picture.
What someone saw is not going to show up in Clearview's biometric surveillance database years later, and while this one human may remember me, the inherent limitations of humans mean that the impact is vastly different from what is possible with technology.
That isn't necessarily true. Just because your eye doesn't doesn't mean mine doesn't. How do you know I wasn't born blind and retrofitted with a silicon eye that gives me both the ability to see and record/duplicate more easily than other humans?
"Hypothetical" is an assumption. You don't know what I have, and what I'm experimenting with.
It exists, albeit only B&W and at a very low resolution. However as we all know, technology can advance very quickly, and high resolution cameras are not inconceivable for this application.
Given how cheap and ubiquitous internet-connected security cams are now, this seems like a distinction without a difference. Unless you expect the “free market” to deliver a brand of “proudly webcam-free” businesses (don’t hold your breath), this is just going to mean that you can’t go in any stores.