Comment by freeone3000
11 hours ago
> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.
Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.
If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.
Feels way different when it's one rando doing it than when it's a government or BigCo with government integration doing it.