Also, I guess you won't mind publishing all of your passwords, physical location at all times, never wearing clothes, living in a transparent house and being video and audio recorded 24x7 either. (Yes, it's unreasonably absurd ad infinitum.) Still not wanting any privacy? How about other people can have as much privacy as they want, and stay the heck off my lawn? ;-P
should we have kept filing cabinets full of papers instead of databases for tracking criminals across state lines as well? see? I can make bullshit comparisons too!
Yes.
2. I suppose you would be ok, then, with a police officer tailing you everywhere you go, recording everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you say, and to whom, peering in the windows of your home if you forget to keep your blinds drawn? Just in case that information happens to be useful to a government at some point in the future?
I find it acceptable that if I go outside I might get caught on some store security camera and that video sits on a hard drive for a week and then gets written over but I do not find it acceptable that the store camera recognizes my face and stores my presence in an easily searchable internet connected database.
There seems to be a lot of conflation on this subject between "expectation of privacy" in the practical sense and "expectation of privacy" in the legal sense. Like, you'd better fuckin believe I expect not to be followed by cops or secret agents everywhere I go. I expect it on the persistence forecast basis and because I understand that it's practically impossible to allocate manpower in that way, assuming they don't think I've done anything wrong in particular.
I also expect that the government, local and federal both, will try to erode my effective privacy in any and every way they can afford and get away with.
None of that has much to do with e.g. the fact that legally, if a cop peers in my window and sees bales of cocaine stacked on the floor of my living room, or whatever, he can come in and take them from me and arrest me.
> Expect: 1. To look for (mentally); to look forward to, as to something that is believed to be about to happen or come; to have a previous apprehension of, whether of good or evil; to look for with some confidence; to anticipate; -- often followed by an infinitive, sometimes by a clause (with, or without, that).
I expect the government to erode my rights.
> Expect: 2. To consider obligatory or required.
I expect the government to respect my rights.
They can sit at home, and watch you, and you yesterday, and if they're really intrigued, you ten years ago!
Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to, except that's more subtle (i.e. instead of having a person following you you have a innumerable amount of cameras sharing the recording burden, but producing the _same end result_).
Also, you might want to say you don't have to hide anything.
But consider how "god" the cyber security of the police is (or most times is not). Also consider that there are frequently cases of police misbehaving by e.g. stalking or discriminating. (I mean there is a lot of police and they are human so it would be surprising if there wouldn't be such cases). Lastly consider how long it will take until police stations would want to sell some most likely very badly anonymized data about people in the city to e.g. shops.
That too will be gone soon when biological recognition services are in the hands of people. I suspect it won't be long until you can arbitrarily pull your phone, grab some video/image and/or audio data, pass a few (hundred) signature markers off to a service and identify people with a variety of metadata associated with them.
>>Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to
This exists now in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.
That said the difference between law enforcement collecting your data and private citizens should also be obvious.
The invention of the bulldozer didn't change property rights.
The point is that the degree to which something is possible at scale has an impact on the practical applications of that thing, and therefore on the people subject to its application. Viz., earth moving machinery (and related engineering) has made possible things that would previously have required orders of magnitude more time and/or manpower, likely making them economically infeasible except in rare cases where money was no object.
He didn't say anything about property rights. That was you... for some reason.
The problem is also that there are a LOT of laws, and it's very easy to manufacture a crime.
I would also suggest reading about people who have been subject to unwarranted surveillance just because of their views, and the damage it does them. A good example is the environmental groups in the 90s in the UK.
These technological changes add additional dimensions, they may not radically change the initial structure but they lead to radically different outcomes than anticipated which society doesn't have to accept.
It's like the difference between listening to Coltrane in the afternoon, vs operating a 24h trumpet school out of your living room.
(basically; you cannot film/photograph anyone without their consent, including in public)
https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/toward_an_approac... (pdf)
You'd expect someone on probation to have that kind of situation.