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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

> If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place

I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.

What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?

If I run into someone at the grocery store, I can remember "oh I saw them yesterday" if the Police interview me. If I start writing down/logging every time I saw that person at the grocery store and plotting it out, I would consider that "crossing the line".

A Flock camera that receives BOLO's for known-criminals and immediately flags captures in real-time is different than tracking every person going everywhere with a history.

What if the grocery store has a security camera pointed at the door that records 24/7? Should they not be allowed to do that?

I think they should be allowed to point it at places inside their store, with prominent disclosure to people entering.

I don't think they should be allowed to point it at the public sidewalk.

So what if they mount inside pointing outside?

Was "I don't think they should be allowed to" ambiguous?

If I see something weird going on outside my house, should I be allowed to take a picture of it?

If I decide to take a picture of what's going on outside my house for no reason at all, should that also be allowed?

if I decide to put a camera in my living room pointed out the window and record, should that be allowed?

If I decide to run a business out of my home, does that change anything?

Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.

Some things that are not much of a problem at a small scale ("take a picture of a specific strange thing you see happening", "record one license plate of a specific car in relation to an incident") can become a problem at scale ("set up a video camera to constantly surveil the sidewalk and do facial recognition on it", "record every license plate that goes by and correlate your recordings with a million other people to generate a tracking map").

The problem is with pervasive surveillance, not discrete observation, and that's the spirit that laws about surveillance should attempt to uphold.

> Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.

That doesn't seem accurate. Do you have an example of a law that prohibits filming on public property? Isn't the legality the whole premise of what those weirdo "first amendment auditors" on YouTube do?

Depends on your local law, but in many, many places you cannot legally record a conversation you aren't a party to, even in public. In the US, in many states, it's not permitted to record a conversation you are a party to if others have not consented. There are various reasonable exceptions that permit recordings (e.g. public events, press conferences, trials, governmental meetings, recording interactions with police). "Conversation between two people happening in public" is not typically a permitted exception for recording.

Note that in this comment I'm talking about audio recording, which typically has much stricter regulations than video recording. I think the same principles should apply to video, and in some jurisdictions they do. But in my comment, I was using the laws around audio recordings vs physical eavesdropping to make an analogy about the problem of pervasive surveillance.

Afaik two party consent rules don't apply in public settings

Again, it depends heavily on the jurisdiction, as well as various other factors.

Try walking around a grocery store with your phone and take a picture of every person you pass. See how they react.

That's the expectation people have for privacy.

Reminds me of the "Surveillance Camera Man" project[1] from a while back, where a guy went around silently filming people in public. People didn't like it and some responded aggressively, even though those same people probably thought nothing of the numerous actual surveillance cameras pointing at them all the time.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46302860

There's a whole category of video content called "First Amendment Audits" where people film with big cameras in public and farm people random, and often quite hostile, reactions.

> Should they not be allowed to do that?

If that camera system is closed-circuit and its data is restricted to the premises they should be permitted to do that.

If the data from that camera system [0] can be removed from the premises by anything less than a search warrant or court order, then no, they should not be permitted to do that.

I know this isn't how the relevant laws work now, but they haven't been adequately updated to account for radical changes in the ability for companies to perform mass surveillance.

[0] ...whether raw or "processed" by -say- a "customer analytics" software... [1]

[1] Want a count of the day's customers? Check register receipts. Want to know what displays are most popular? Ask your employees, or employ someone to take notes. etc, etc, etc.

> I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.

- United states v Jones

- Carpenter v United States

- florida v jardines

- kyllo v united states

All affirm some level of expectation of privacy in public.

ALPR's, facial recognition, drone surveillance are going to get challenged at some point. GORSUCH in this opinion pontificated on Katz v United States. Highly recommend reading his opinion

Would you be happy with a public "petcat tracker" site that published your personal location and image 24/7 whenever you are out in public, from data collected from Flock and other similar products? If you think that would cross a line, you do have some expectation of privacy even in a public place.

Right: This kind of law is supposed to conform to the common expectation, not dictate it!

We all might expect someone could take a photo of us walking down the sidewalk, but that's not the same as "expecting" to be followed by a virtual (or even literal) drone-swarm that constantly catalogues our every movement cross-referenced to potential interactions with everyone else.

I would like to visit the park without several large cameras staring me down at every junction now.

I would like to go to various establishments, or maybe even political meetups, without being profiled by insurance agents and law enforcement officers. Especially now that it seems simply attending a political meeting could land me decades in prison.

I would, as the US Supreme Court just reaffirmed is my right, not like to have my location continuously tracked immediately upon leaving my home via such a camera network. Otherwise this entire ruling is just subverted by adding a few extra steps.

I do. It's not the legal norm in the US, but in many countries you are still considered to have a right of privacy when you are outside your home. In Japan, for example, you can be sued for publishing photographs or video of street scenes without either securing permission or redacting the faces of passers-by.

> but in many countries

Which countries?

Japan, for example.

You can easily look up which other countries strictly enforce personality rights in public spaces and see for yourself, I'm not here to service you.

The cases covered under the 4A:

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

"persons", "papers" and "effects"; just because I am in public does not give the police carte blanche to search me.

We do have semiprivate places in public, for example bathrooms, based on an expectation of privacy. There is no reason that expectation cannot be changed or extended in ways.

You're suggesting people can look through your briefcase, purse, backpack without a warrant in a public place.

> What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?

I believe my papers and effects should NOT be subject to unreasonable searches.

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