Why is this legal? Who allows this? What do we do?
What about setting up a camera on your roof aimed at your neighbor's bedroom window, and livestreaming it online? What about secretly recording the conversation that you're having with someone in a restaurant? What about recording the comings and goings of the people who enter or leave a gay bar, or a mosque?
The million (almost 2 million) dollar toilet comes to mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/san-francisco-toilet.h...
Its even worse in some places. I see schools, colleges, libraries are getting installed on public land. I mean where are we gonna end up with this.
it won't be cost effective to repair the cameras, so they'll go away.
If the right to privacy arrived at from this discussion kills a product line or a business, oh well. Human rights > profits, broadly speaking.
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
It’s the difference between recording and monitoring. You’re allowed to record in a public space, but you’re not allowed to monitor it.
In the US. In much of the world it is.
But again, enforcement of this is terribly weak. It is virtually impossible to verify, and even if the government somehow did, it is trivial to circumvent as you just have to tilt the camera a few degrees or slightly change the block-out zones on the camera, and you can't really see the difference from the outside. On top of the police having a vested interest in the breaking of this rule because it helps them tremendously during investigations.
Any time someone is doing something to you that you don't like and it's legal just do it back to them twice as much, and publically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Are a very useful combination.
In short there are vanishingly few privacy laws in the US, and the few that do exist are mostly undermined by fake consent in EULA/TOS documents-that-nobody-reads. Even when a company somehow does manage to run aground of some law, they generally just end up with financial slap on the wrist while keeping their ill gotten data gains.
The best time to push for meaningful privacy legislation was over the past 40 years when all of these surveillance databases were being built out. But the second best time is now, especially as more people gain awareness of how pervasive and invasive this totalitarian industry has become. The records being created and kept by this industry would make a dyed in the wool Stasi agent blush, and Americans need to start rejecting this fallacious narrative that things that are reasonable for individuals to do at a small bespoke passing scale remain legitimate when scaled up to industrial levels.