But that "everyone" isn't a single entity recording everywhere in public with the intent of providing tracking information of everyone else. If I'm in the background of someone's selfie and posts it online, it could be used to get my location at a specific time, sure, but their intent wasn't to do so and the scope of their recording is dramatically more limited than Flock.
I understand how if you wave away all concepts of fallibility or enforceability, you can say to people, "It's cool that all this data exists, just don't be creepy," but you can't wave those concepts away.
The idea that laws are clear-cut is largely a programmers fantasy.
Related: there's a lot of people who think that if you don't technically break the law then you're off the hook.
Uh, no, not how law works. The letter of the law doesn't matter, the spirit does. Being an asshole but not technically breaking the law is still illegal.
Yes, that's a lot different than code, isnt it? But it has to be.
The reason I'm smug is that technical people think they're hyper intelligent and cracked the code.
Ha! Those silly law makers! Don't they know I perfectly followed the laws algorithm and hit an edge case? Now they HAVE to let me off the hook!
No they don't. Why would they have to do that? Laws aren't algorithms, they're natural language intended to curb bad behavior.
If your behavior is bad, and a judge or jury thinks it's bad, you're getting curbed.
The inverse of that is you can actually break the law and get away with it, if the behavior isn't bad. Maybe it's justified, maybe you're a struggling single mother or something... the jury can just say "nahhh" and you go home.
You discovered that there are certain amounts of judgment calls and subjectivity in the legal system, and then you seemed to get really excited, stop thinking, and start patting yourself on the back for your incredible insight. This whole, "Boom, sometimes people use human judgment legal cases, bet you NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT you STUPID TECH PERSON" is the world's most banal insight and the fact that you seem to think it's the entire analysis of the situation suggests that you're a stupid person.
Go find a lawyer (ie, not a tech person), and try this out on them.
Of course there is an element of subjectivity in every law and every case. But there is also a serious and deliberate attempt by the entire apparatus of the legal system to in fact systematize the way that the legal code is applied to human behavior. Yes, there are limits both to how far that systematization can go based on the complexity of real life and how far people want to let it go. But it's a matter of degree, and your whole line about how judges and juries just think that they can and should punish any behavior they think is "bad" without reference to a systemic law is stupid and incorrect.
Sometimes of course laws are written to be extremely vague and judgment based. Those laws have objectively bad outcomes, and are usually either quietly dustbinned, reformed, or the legal system attempts to systematize them, creating judicial doctrines that apply actual rules to how they work. (And, because again it seems like I'm talking to a very naive person, I'll caveat that of course such systems do not remove all ambiguity -- they merely manage it). And this is because the lawyers and judges that you want to imagine as agreeing with you recognize that a system in which you go in front of a judge and he just decides if you're "bad" is a terrible system.
And now I predict that you're going to answer this with some kind of big "nuh-uh, you're dumb." Here's what I suggest instead: I'm done with this thread. If you actually want to improve your understanding of the world instead of trying to shore up your ego, go and find someone in the legal world and ask them what they think of your takes here.
> Having no expectation of privacy in public
>"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken
Oh lord, think of the children folks. We're going to have to shut it all down.
The absolutist "no public privacy" stance suggests that I would be ok (legally and morally) to create a widespread camera system that tracks cellphone screens in public and automatically records any passwords that are being entered within view of the cameras and sends them to me. This is ok because, in the absolutist view, your screen and finger movements were visible in public. This feels pretty wrong to me.
It's the difference between targeted surveillance and dragnet surveillance. Technology has made things that were previously only possible through targeted surveillance to be cheaply achieved through dragnet means, both to governments and individual citizens.
You either had to have a cop or a PI tail you, or spend time and effort talking to neighbors and acquaintances collecting information and correlating it, and it was much harder to do so secretly.
Technology has reduced the cost of surveillance by several orders of magnitude, and although the premise is unchanged - that you've never had privacy in public - the practical impact has changed in an extremely disturbing way.
I think we're long overdue to rethink and strengthen privacy protections in public in the US. Technological limits, and policy limits on specific implementations are better than nothing, but it's clear to me that surveillance will continue to get cheaper and thus your effective privacy in public will continue to erode until a culture and legal shift in public privacy expectations. I'm not optimistic about that.