There’s obviously a line somewhere though, right? Like if that same company put a camera in a bathroom stall?
So on one extreme with have CCTV parking lot cams, on the other we have bathroom stalls. It seems like we could find where spy cameras that exist solely to break citizens rights to privacy land on the spectrum and write laws around that.
The government can certainly be limited by statute (police may be statutorily required to obtain a warrant to use aggregated ALPR data or may be barred from using it entirely), and may already be limited by existing case law - the relevant courts have not yet decided.
Limiting Home Depot from streaming a traffic cam or CCTV footage from the confines of their publicly-accessible property is no different than limiting a news crew who would choose to capture the same footage and share it with the world. This is very basic freedom of speech/press - especially when the information isn't being individualized to any one target (as a credit bureau might do.) Everyone is being collected and processed equally.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorrell_v._IMS_Health_Inc. - and have a look at the panel of Justices that ruled in consensus, even Sotomayor joined the still-existing majority on this matter. GP's proposed legislation almost certainly runs afoul of this fairly-recent decision.
> There’s obviously a line somewhere though
For the limitation of the government, the line is called "reasonable expectation of privacy." Any reasonable person would expect there to exist reasonable expectation to privacy in a bathroom stall, and the user of the stall has generally taken affirmative measures to ensure the same: they closed the door behind them, locked it.
When you are outdoors, especially on public property, you generally have no "expectation of privacy." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States
You may be recorded, the things you are observed doing are admissible in court, etc. in places where you reasonably expect people to be able to observe you. Driving down a public, taxpayer-funded road is the quintessential example of "no reasonable expectation of privacy."
what about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States?
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere ~ John Roberts
I do get the separation from private companies and government. I'm not arguing that. But this ruling was specifically about using Cell data collected by a private company being used to violate the privacy rights of citizens.
I don't think a private company harvesting data from public spaces and then reselling it is loop-hole enough to say "press rights > privacy rights". And there's precedence from the SCOTUS to support my belief on that.
Carpenter didn't stop these companies from collecting historic cell site data, selling it privately, or giving it to police with a warrant.