This is where you need to keep in mind that there's a spectrum and a balance. Ultimately it's up to the Supreme Court to decide where the cut-off points are. To take your example and riff on it a bit:
- There's you walking to work and mentally taking note of everyone you walk past
- There's you walking to work with a video camera and casually recording everyone you walk past
- There's you walking to work with a video camera and getting into people's personal space to make sure your video accurate captures enough of their facial features to make a positive biometric identification
- There's you walking to work, seeing someone in particular, and following them to their destination while recording the entire time
- There's you putting up a high-resolution camera in front of your house to record everyone walking past, whether or not you're watching it at the time
- There's you putting up time-synchronized high-resolution cameras on every light post in your neighbourhood
- There's taking your network of time-synchronized high-resolution cameras and adding facial/person recognition to it so that you automatically get a timestamped path of where everyone walked at what time
- There's expanding your network of time-synchronized high-resolution cameras with person recognition to cover your entire city and selling access to person-location data
Figuring out where the acceptable/unacceptable cutoff line is for private citizens, corporations, and governments is going to be an interesting question that'll have to be answered in the near future.
A 33-year-old woman became pregnant due to a failure in her birth control but is not looking to have a child and is looking to have an abortion. She goes to her OBGYN and finds out that the fetus is around 7 weeks of gestation, and therefore, cannot have an abortion in her state.
She schedules an abortion procedure with a doctor out of state that does allow abortions after 6 weeks. She drives to the airport, flies out to the state, has the procedure, and then flies back home. Per her state's law (let's say it's Texas) she did not utilize the highways or drive through a town like Amarillo to receive the abortion.[1]
Systems such as these, selling user data to both state and federal agencies bought data that included her travel patterns in it. The system (recognizing her license plate, vehicle make and model, and the state having that plate registered in her name) shows that she has traveled to a clinic in the state, then later to the airport (with TSA facial identification indicating she did indeed fly), she was then spotted at a clinic in another state by their Flock cameras, then flew back home and drove home. But also, the government agencies bought data from a period tracker and it also had her information in there. With GPS, IP Address, and other data they were able to attribute data to her that showed that she was late on her period.[2]
The state then charges her with the crime of receiving an abortion out of state, even though she did not break any law. She did not receive an abortion in the state, nor travel through a city that prohibits that. But good luck explaining that to an Attorney General who decides to follow the "spirit of the law" in this case rather than the text of the law.
This is what people are afraid of. No human being would ever be allowed to conduct this level of spying on anyone without violating their right to privacy. But because we allowed this data to be collected and shared for commercial purposes, it's somehow legal and okay? We are becoming a police state where who you know, where you go, what you do, your patterns, your habits, your scrolling, your fitness tracking, your purchases, and the amount of time you spend walking around Walmart are now all available to a government. These aren't systems you can "opt" out of. Facebook tracks and sells your data through their Pixel whether you have an account or not. These Flock cameras track and sell your location data whether you're driving, walking, riding a bike, etc. There is no opting out, there is no not participating, there is no way to protect your privacy and continue to exist in this world.
These are very real fears that people have, and all it takes is for a government to get through its bureaucracy once to determine how to process this deluge of information and then there is no turning back.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/13/abortion-travel-ban-...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/05/10/1097482967/roe-v-wade-supreme...