Comment by consumer451

We don’t _need_ many things. But there are real problems that it solves and solves better than anything else.

I feel like the best solution is very tightly regulating and auditing this technology so it can only be used to benefit society.

Agreed. I now realize that my initial comment did not make my position clear.

1) Except for specific things like third and fourth amendment rights, you don’t have a blanket “privacy” right, much less in public.

2) If your argument is that flock cameras are illegal, take them to court.

I have been researching family genealogy, and this alleged "privacy" has never actually been a thing at all, much less a "human right". First, it is well-known for anyone who lived in a small town, that every small town had rumor mills, gossip grapevines, and everyone knew everyone else's business, to the extent that there was a daily soap opera drama about relationships, and hard times and good times as well.

So this small-town attitude was imported when people urbanized, and a lot of neighborhoods had this sort of grapevine as well. Furthermore, the urban centers established some distinct "brother's keepers" practices.

There were the City Directories. Before telephones, these were the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Your name, your occupation, your address. All your neighbors and the businesses on your street. All indexed and alphabetized handily. Everyone in the city would know what you did; they all got subscribed to these directories. These are invaluable resources for researchers today, so that we can find folks and know their professions, sometimes on a year-by-year basis.

Census reports were taken every 10 years. These can be highly unreliable resources! The census takers had no way of verifying information or investigating answers! They always took citizens at face-value, so it was the practice of new immigrants and criminals, and others in the shadows, to conceal the truth from the census takers. But nevertheless, some facts were obvious, and so there was good information gathered, and released by USGov, about household compositions.

Also, the newspapers have been a crazy treasure trove of information since their inception. I was literally able to track the movements of some of my relatives, because the newspapers in each town would report when a family member, or friend, visited someone. They would say if they came by car, and how long they planned to stay, and where they're from and all that. So anyone traveling in the 1930s and 1940s and so on, their movements were never "private" and you had journalists who acted as Human License Plate Reporters, ensuring that the whole town knew you were hanging out for the weekend!

In public? I have an (actually-enumerated) First Amendment right to record you. End of argument.