US courts have held, in multiple cases now, that creating a massive network of datapoints over time, aggregated together, can be a 4th amendment violation in a way that a single datapoint is not.

I would be against people standing on every single corner taking video of other citizens 24/7 and handing it over to a private company, yes.

Without a physical human operating the camera, at the site, yes, it should not be allowed.

This is actually the distinction in many EU countries, i.e. it’s allowed to record a movie if the operator is present, but doing the same thing remotely requires permission from a special authority/agency (that’s not in cahoots with the police).

If those people recording on their cell phones are going to coordinate and provide mass surveillance to the government, then yes, I would hope most people are against that.

The concern is that these cameras can track all your movements in a vehicle (you can make a graph of license plate locations and times), continuously record audio, collect information from other sensors, and that is an affront to the right to privacy. For some reason despite all this surveillance the drugs still flow on the streets. A very Orwellian situation.

It's a network of nation wide cameras tracking movement, which can include foot traffic from people's phones. You're giving police and a private company a lot of power with that sort of data. There was a case of a sheriff in Texas town using a nation wide search to find a woman who had an abortion using Flock cameras after claiming it was used for a missing person case.

This because Texas has a hard on for trying to prosecute women who have abortions.

The same way we can't have a database of gun owners.

> Are you against people taking videos in public on their cell phones?

That's literally not what's happening, though. And any suggestion that it is comes from either ignorance or lies.

I'll let you in on a little secret: there are things you and I can do that the government cannot do, and the police are the government.

I'll forgive you for thinking that the police are just private citizens.

Eventually, yes, if it goes as far as what Flock is doing.

I feel like none of the replies are really cutting to the core of what the problem with your logic actually is—because your way of thinking is incredibly common in tech since it's what we do all day. The fallacy is scale invariance, that the nature of a thing doesn't change when the scale does. Anything you can do you can put in a for loop.

And the equivalence you're drawing is that the fundamental nature of someone recording a video with their phone is the same as a digital panopticon.

Criminals are people too.

So you know how like, "the government" and "private citizens" aren't the same thing, right? Like there are different obligations for both? You do know and understand this, correct? The government has a constitutional requirement not to perform undue/unnecessary search or seizure.

Pretty sure "search" includes "building a panopticon from which all citizens can be viewed at all times", but explain why you disagree.