A camera pointed at a public street isn't the same constitutional question as LE searching a persistent database to reconstruct someone's movements. The latter falls into fourth amendment search territory.
This isn't the case of law enforcement using a third party to get around constitutional requirements. The government could set up their own cameras doing exactly what Flock does, and it would still not violate anyone's constitutional requirements. Because people don't have a right to not be recorded in public, no matter how much you want that to be the case.
The same amount that you do, dude. You're in every single one of these threads, and despite being proven wrong over and over again you keep being "confused" about how people are against this technology. Even in this thread, you keep responding with the same points based on your equivocation of an individual taking a picture in public and a state law enforcement organization aggregating and tracking individuals who haven't committed crimes.
Try reading some SC cases and actually paying attention to the responses you're getting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629159
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629142
And yet you still start yet another thread insisting that a database makes public facing video cameras a privacy violation.
When have I been "proven wrong over and over again"? The court cases you've cited are all about governments demanding private cell phone location information. You're trying to take decisions that amount to, "the police need a warrant to demand private cellphone location data from telecoms" and make the enormous leap to your imaginary decision, "the police cannot record people in public and search those recordings".
> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of Alito, J.). For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” Id., at 430.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402
Edit for your edit: you haven't refuted anything man, you keep trotting out the same arguments in those linked threads:
- The data includes "private movements" which is why it's unconstitutional (the SC said aggregation of public data can impel privacy concerns)
- An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
- The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
"To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment);"
This is about the police planting a GPS tracker on someone's car - that's that "Jones" is referring to here. That case involved the police tracking someone in public and in private.
You seem to be under the impression that the opinion of the court in the Jones was that everyone's public movements are private and the police need a warrant to track your public movements through and any all means. But that was not the decision of the court. The police and still just follow you, Jones notwithstanding.
You can desire your public movements to be protected by the Fourth amendment all you want, but that does not make it so.
And maybe it wasn't the decision in Jones, but Carpenter specifically cites Alito's concurrence for the proposition that a person has a 4A privacy interest in aggregation of movement data and describes GPS tracking in Jones as raising those privacy concerns.
But does it? You keep insisting this is the case, but your attempts to back up this claim are cases with totally different scenarios. Namely demanding that telecoms hand over location information.
> - An individual or LE can take a photograph of you or your house, therefore collecting photographs from geolocated cameras and tracking you over time is not constitutionally distinct (but it is)
The point is to emphasize that the information collected by Flock is in plain view. The plain view doctrine is well established. The police don't need a warrant to observe publicly visible things.
> The specific technology at the center of these cases are not ALPRs, therefore the rulings have no bearing on Flock (despite the fact that courts are not litigating the specific technology, but rather the constitutional principles of their use)
The cases you've cited all involved private information being obtained without a warrant. You can't just ignore the fact that a GPS tracker or cell phone location information also reveals private movements, as opposed to public facing camera which only record public activity.