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Comment by cipehr | Hacker News Reader

Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.

The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?

The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.

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If your neighbors were across the street and had their blinds open could you point your camera at their window and take pictures?

License plates were designed to be read and visible and they show that the vehicle is registered, but what about inside the vehicle? Do we have privacy in there?

What exactly does 'in public' mean? And why shouldn't someone have privacy from being recorded and their movements tracked even if they are in public?

None of these things are a given. The rights we have are because we decided they were important. There is no reason we can't revisit the question as situations change.

Might make sense to revisit the constitutionality of license plates, rather than try to attack public recording.

They're demanding you show your "papers" registration at all times without articulable suspicion you've committed a crime/infraction. The fourth amendment arguably protects us from the government requiring us to show us our papers at all times when we're travelling in the most common form of conveyance.

Abolishing license plates could be a solution if complicating identifying cars is what you want. It would do nothing about face recognition.

> The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?

This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.

Awesome, thank you for the input. I suspected NASA was operating this way, but I had no idea there was a period of exclusivity. In the case of NASA, the private companies are those like JPL and the sorts I guess?

I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?

I read about this regarding Hubble imagery, but pretty sure it applies to all missions funded by tax payers. The teams requesting time from the platforms are granted exclusive time to work out what they need so they can publish their papers for credit and what not.

One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.

Fascinating thank you.

> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.

Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.

You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.

https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/4241/e...

Japan has set about harmonizing its privacy laws with the GPDR and similar for business purposes.

> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

Not parent poster, but yes!

What people expect are outcomes. The mechanics they know of for how data is/isn't available is merely how they reach their reasonable expectation.

I expect that almost nobody I meet in public is a Stasi informant.

P.S.: To put it another way, a major purpose law is to clarify and codify the expectations the people. Not just expectations of privacy, but expectations of when we have liberty to observe or record.

We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.

In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.

There is certainly some expectation of privacy in public. California at least has anti-paparazzi laws covering some of this.

> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

Sure. The expectation is that your every move in public is not being recorded and stored on a central system that the government, and by extension various kinds of bad actors, can access.

In a society where the government's role is to defend its citizenry rather than participate in their exploitation, this would be an easy choice.

US governments (both federal and local) face some challenges here, because "defend its citizenry" is not really one of its main goals.

> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.

Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.

Feels way different when it's one rando doing it than when it's a government or BigCo with government integration doing it.

Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.

If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.

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