Comment by tiahura
5 months ago
No expectation of privacy in public is tautological, that’s what public means. Your feelings of embarrassment or paranoia don’t trump my right to observe what’s going on in the public domain.
5 months ago
No expectation of privacy in public is tautological, that’s what public means. Your feelings of embarrassment or paranoia don’t trump my right to observe what’s going on in the public domain.
Absolutist stances like this generally lead to undesirable outcomes as technology advances and changes the scale-per-dollar practical limitations of surveillance, which is exactly my point around our need to adjust how absolutely we consider the lack of privacy expectations in public.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
True but in public you can collect almost any data a person would reasonably expect to be private. What remains private?