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by caconym_ 2341 days ago
1. What one expects != what one thinks is right.

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?

2 comments

Yep, and its also not a reasonable thing to say "If you go outside you accept total surveillance." Since going outside is a requirement for life.

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.

Yeah, "find it acceptable" is good verbiage.

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.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/expect#Verb

> 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.

With aerial planes, and facial recognition everywhere, they won't have to.

They can sit at home, and watch you, and you yesterday, and if they're really intrigued, you ten years ago!

Yeah, that's the point. In justifying this sort of ubiquitous surveillance, the phrase "expectation of privacy" (and related verbiage) is being grossly abused.
Your mobile phone provides much better tracking than what tracking can be achieved with FR. Your mobile is a giant microphoned fink you're carrying around, providing exactly your worst imaginations of what FR might eventually become.