That's my point. If "soap box speaking" was as common as tweeting or posting on Facebook or speaking to a friend in a pub, people wouldn't expect it to be different. When social media changed from "technology pioneers use it carefully" to "everybody uses it and rarely thinks twice before hitting send", the expectation of the average user shifts.
> while understanding anything on the other side of the line is fair game
I do agree: Fair game for any person. As soon as technology enters the game (scrapers, databases etc), it changes. Similarly, you can sit in a park and catch fragments of what the people walking by talk about, that's all right. If you're using a directional microphone to listen in on people on the other side of the park, that's not. A user doesn't expect to the target of a microphone or a webscraper/data mining operation.
If people don't expect this, it's because they don't understand it.
Let's work on educating people instead of warping reality around the ignorant.
In that case, you're allowed to remotely listen in on everyone as long as they're in a public space.
> If people don't expect this, it's because they don't understand it.
Absolutely, and because everything is done so that they either don't understand it, or quickly forget it. Change Twitter's send button to "I want everyone, including my enemies, the government, journalists and my mother to read this" ... and you'll pretty much kill Twitter.
> Let's work on educating people instead of warping reality around the ignorant.
The ignorant make up the majority. We can't educate everybody about machine learning to the required degree where they can make an informed decision about it. The same goes for financial instruments or law. Instead, we just outlaw the most egregious transgressions ("no, it said on page 277 of the contract that we get all the money he'll ever make in return for this bicycle") and base what's allowed on what a reasonable person would expect.
You're willfully continuing to ignore the soap box analogy.
If we're keeping up with analogies, that's like saying someone doesn't expect what they say on a soap box to be heard by anyone. That's a false expectation, however.
We have to strike a balance between ideology and pragmatism. The best compromise is likely preventing the government from having access to data we consider private, while understanding anything on the other side of the line is fair game and accessible to friends, family, politicians, corporations, and historians alike.
The only way we can achieve this is by limiting what can be done with this data aka fixing the US government. We cannot, for example, have public or inferred health data used to prevent people from attaining health insurance.