Says who?

We had quite a lot of privacy in public spaces before everybody and his dog yielded a cameraphone.

Privacy is not a binary ("oh, since you can be seen by people passing by in public anyway, it means you don't have any privacy") -- it's a spectrum. You could still be OK with people seeing you, but not with being photographed AND tagged automatically (e.g. with timestamp and GPS from a friend's phone) AND posted online AND indexed and available for anybody in the world to search for your name/pictures in perpetuity...

E.g. whether it's OK for the government to check your email if you already give it to an email provider vs snail mail, and such BS. Or whether idiots with gun fetishes for "protecting their property" are what was meant by "well armed militias"...

2) The 2nd amendment doesn't say you have the right to join a militia. It protects the right to bear arms. I assume you wouldn't agree with taking a similarly narrow approach to the right to free speech, for example.

Want to bet that in 20 years, we refine that to "strict scrutiny applies only to to the individual right to bear the specific kinds of arms used in a well-regulated militia, and rational basis to all other arms"?

Get real. Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and laws has never been "blatantly obvious". Your viewpoint is yours and your bias is confirming it.

Well, it has always been subject to the political pressure from various lobbies and interests...

Judges can write whole treatises with delicate legal interpretations to justify their alliances, government pressure and/or under the table money.

Kind of like medieval religious scholars could write treatises on how many angels fit on the head of a pin -- it pays well and furthers their friends cause.

Between those issues, the death penalty, three strikes laws, and such -- not to mention widespread litigation mania--, the legal code there is kind of the joke in the western world.

Also, you can still have reasonable expectations of privacy in public locations, such as your words not being recorded without your consent.

There's a difference though, between expecting the public to witness one's own actions in that very moment, and having everyone, at any time, forever, being able to replay a recording of that moment.

The latter is something only public figures, and only in their public role, should have to expect.

As much as I too dislike having my picture taken without consent, the reality of even small towns is that it's probable every person you pass has a camera, and pictures are plentiful as a result. Incidental pictures, pictures of an awkward moment or accident, or just something funny I think have to be expected more, if not by people actively photographing these with their phones/tablets, then passively by accidental photos and by monitoring systems.

I don't know if there is a good balance between the two since there's nothing inherently wrong about just taking a picture of your surroundings in a public place - the people there are part of what make the photo. To use an over-used expression, pin-hole sized cameras on phones were just opening pandora's box, and we can't really close that anymore. More than likely, the result of this will be photography obscuring clothing, styles, and technology, some of which others have already posted.

German law for example explicitly works like this, the stated reason being the avoidance of chilling effects that would otherwise harm democratic participation.

With US law anyways, I've not exactly been sure how remediation would work in an instance where you challenged for control and ownership of your likeness in a case like this. (e.g., a silly picture from a barwhere someone was dancing on the counter to Louie Louie or something). Once it's online, it's copied and repasted automatically by bots countless times as soon as it becomes scrapable - who is actually culpable during this?

Can you elaborate on what the German law actually states and does? This isn't challenging the notion or intent behind the German law, I just don't know how it works and would be curious to know specifically what's addressed and how the German courts have handled it.

Exemptions are provided for cases like you snapping an image of a building or a group of your friends while I am just passing by (i.e. I am just incidentally part of the picture), or police mug shots.

I, too, am seeing that technological developments change our assumptions of privacy and socially acceptable behaviour, BTW. I just wanted to point out that we as a society can also choose to prevent unwanted consequences if we deem them unacceptable.

Maybe social norms should be shaped around what people actually want, rather than what some new or old technology dictates as its default option?

And even if that's so, do they also want to have those photos tagged, their friends face-recognized, and everything ending up searchable online?

Looks more like what Google, FB etc wants -- to collect even more data for ads and stuff.

Not in any significant numbers, and mainly when being tourists.

But I think we're at the point where if you say "social norms should should be shaped around what people actually want", the onus is on you to show that people don't "actually want" to have cameras and use them.

I don't know if you have the same feeling but I do notice a chilling effect in how I behave when I see that someone has their phone out and its camera is pointed approximately in my direction (although they might be checking messages).

You may not have a right to privacy, but you should have a right to non-celebrity.

Going out in public does not constitute permission to become a figure of mockery on youtube. Requiring everyone to wear their PR-face in public in case they get recorded for all time and broadcast to every person on the planet is dystopic.

You totally have the right to take a photo of me, store it on your hard drive and look at it occasionally. Uploading it to reddit might be a different case.

Granted I doubt it's practically enforceable in all cases but it's at least theoretically possible. It would be cool if such a button could be detected and people wearing it would get blurred by the photo-software of cell phones automatically.

Being in a public place does not necessarrily mean being public.