Comment by andrewla
5 months ago
I continue to believe that privacy in public spaces is not a civil liberty and we should not be treating it as such. You have the right to be secure in your home or in private spaces, but it is your obligation to ensure that you have made an effort to preserve that privacy. Once you are in public, there should be no expectation that anything that another person could see or otherwise observe is not subject to public exposure.
We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing. When the state takes action to deliberately make public or otherwise observe things that are reasonably private, then we can activate the right to be free of searches and seizures without probably cause.
The one area that I do feel affects this particular debate is whether it should be legal to conceal your vehicle's identity, so long as it is not being done for fraudulent or criminal purposes. Here I think the fact that your car's identity is being observed and recorded is sufficient cause to make it reasonable to mask or alter your license place or other identifying aspects of your car.
> We should not be expending effort trying to regulate the state's ability to observe and record any publicly observable thing.
But then what can we do? Are we supposed to just never leave our homes? If we can't regulate the power of the state to minimize the harm it can cause, then all is lost.
Also, Flock isn't just a "power of the state" sort of thing. It's a private company and is often used by private entities.
No, go ahead and leave your home. Why wouldn't you leave your home?
What if a police officer or a nosy neighbor is watching your house specifically and writes down your comings and goings? You surrender a certain amount of privacy by leaving a private space, and this is just how the world works.
The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals. The only reason why this is an issue at all is that law enforcement uses data from Flock, and the various rights that you have prevent agents of the state from doing things that the state itself is not entitled to do.
For "harm" you need to be extremely specific. If the state uses this data to blackmail you or extort you, then they are committing the crimes of blackmail and extortion. Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
If they use the data to interfere with the rights of freedom of association in any way then that is also illegal and they should be prosecuted for it, or at the very least be unable to use that as evidence.
> Why wouldn't you leave your home?
Because I don't want to have to live my life under constant surveillance. That means I can no longer really live a free life. Even if you never do anything illegal or unethical, if you're always being watched, you're always having to second-guess everything you do. That effect is the entire point of a panopticon.
In the world you seem to be advocating for, the only time we'd actually be free and able to relax and be ourselves is when we pretty much completely disconnect from society.
It's like how when people know that their use of something is being tracked (think the old "Nielsen families", the tracking that streaming services do, or software telemetry) they use that thing very differently than they otherwise would because they are considering the impact their data will have.
> The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals.
Yes, this is my point exactly. It's why exposure to the state is, in many ways, a lesser risk than private companies.
> Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.
Not always, and even when they are, that often doesn't matter in practice.
You surrender a certain amount of privacy
Right. And this discussion is about the amount of privacy we're accepting to lose. Acting like it's a binary choice is very authoritarian of you.