Perhaps this shows how self-obsessed we are: to think that anyone is going to care about us walking down the street minding our own business. Maybe it's the uncertainty that makes people uneasy. I can walk down the street recording everyone with my smartphone, but at least they know they're being filmed.
Check out any number of tumblr blogs. People of Wal-Mart. Look at That Fucking Hipster, etc.
Or a very, very large section of /r/pics or /r/funny on Reddit.
Even ignoring the extreme cases like /r/creepshots, the Internet has already proven that it greatly enjoys taking pictures of strangers in everyday life and mocking them mercilessly.
People would like to go around with their fly accidentally undone and not have a bunch of armchair comedians commenting on their junk. People would like to go around on a bad hair day without it being picked apart by screeching Internet fashionistas. Our fear of being spread all around the internet is grounded in past instances of nobodies being spread all around the internet.
To answer the tangent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representativeness_heuristic
This particular topic is near and dear to me - I do a lot of street photography which is, at least partially, defined as taking pictures of strangers in a documentary manner, and almost always takes place in public.
Countries with strong privacy laws, such as France and Japan, do suffer from this. The photographic community in the UK has been hit hard in the past few years as even innocuous picture-taking of popular landmarks has been hit with intense police scrutiny if your gear is too "good".
We do not want the heavy hand of government in here, because inevitably this will mean throwing the baby out with the bath water. Expression and art is usually at the boundaries of what society currently finds palatable, and activities along this border needs to be regulated by people, not immutable and slow-changing laws.
The only solution I can think of (and it's not a particularly good one) is to slam the door shut on people who would abuse their freedom of expression and whose actions will lead to the loss of freedom by inviting regulation. I'd rather oppose people rather than technology, though.
I fully agree, but I see this from another perspective. In the past, people in public didn't care so much when they were photographed or filmed in public. Nowadays, so many people in public will claim privacy or their personal rights.
This change in attitude has brought the art form of street photography nearly to extinction. In the past, people often ignored photographers, while nowadays, some people will demand you delete pictures, try to take your camera to smash it, or even threaten to call the police even though they just accidentally ran into your view finder.
In Germany, some privacy fundamentalists have already threatened that are going to destroy Google Glasses when they meet people who use them, and call that "digital self-defense".
If your worst fear is having your photo show up on one of those "poorly dressed and out of shape" websites, this is easy to brush off.
If you're an attractive woman (or girl) walking down the street minding your own business, there is already a real possibility to end up on some sort of voyeur/jailbait website and become a target of sexualized comments. It is completely reasonable to be concerned about sexual predators having an even easier time taking those photos.
Privacy, no. But we expect some stupid thing we do in public to have a localized, temporary effect. Maybe you get a few dirty looks, maybe some people laugh at you, thats it. But once its on the internet its there 1. forever 2. easily discoverable by people you know.
That's pretty scary to me. I can walk home drunk and silly and a few people in college might find out. With glass, everyone on my facebook, including employers/co-workers find out and see a video of it.
On the flip side, it would be liberating to see this happen on such a large scale that we come to accept these things and give people a break for having a bad day or doing something silly in public.
Nonetheless, the idea that there will eventually be cameras everywhere putting videos online, combined with technologies such as location-tagging and ever-better face recognition, means that in the not-too-distant future it may be possible for someone to retroactively stalk me by splicing together bits of lots of different videos, determining exactly where I was throughout my day.
While it's possible that the benefits of these technologies outweigh the costs, it's not too hard to dream up dystopian scenarios.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
I know this sounds paranoid, but given past behaviour of totalitarian government, I don't see why any future techno-totalitarian society would not use that kind of tools. And my example is rather mild, it could be something much more sinister that travel restrictions... This is one the reason I find the "Right to be Forgotten" a sane idea.
I don't think I agree with this point. I know most countries have some kind of laws saying more or less this, but I think there is an implicit agreement regarding how much of what I do every day is public or not, and the lack of security cameras in bathrooms is a reflection of this.
I might be wrong, but I think that if we were to write privacy laws today, knowing that we (almost) have the technology to monitor everyone everywhere, we wouldn't write something as simple-minded as "you don't have any right to privacy in public places at all" - I think we would probably throw a "reasonable right to privacy" in there somehow.
They are very different concepts and trying to force secrecy for privacy is against normal behaviour.
Go ask any old Russian about this.