[johnea]

In the US it's illegal for anyone to do it.

This is just as clear a violation of the 4th amendment as the multi-billion dollar goggle empire.

But nobody really cares about that do they? Laws are routinely enforced or ignored based on which option allows the largest profits for incumbents.

[Spooky23]

Nope. I built one of these things years ago to control a parking gate. We did a lot of legal review due to customer concerns. There’s nothing illegal unless you facilitate certain behaviors that vary by jurisdiction.

The police have huge networks. Almost all speed and red light cameras record 7-30 days of continuous video. Typically those installations cover most entry and exit points of a city. The DEA operates interstate surveillance on drug corridors. There are LPR hits and driver/passenger pictures from Maine to Miami, for example. All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.

[AnthonyMouse]

> All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.

"Driving is a privilege" is a slogan created by authoritarians. The word "driving" doesn't appear in the constitution one way or the other. Travel is a right.

[Spooky23]

I didn't see "stuff stored on a computer hard drive" in the constitution either, just paper.

[AnthonyMouse]

So judges are smart enough to figure out that files on a computer are the equivalent of files on paper and the only reason they didn't spell that out is that they didn't exist at the time.

The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or some other pre-automobile mode of transport. For that to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?

[defrost]

Travel is a right, sure.

Walking is a right, sure.

Driving a car is a reasonable parallel to pulling a carriage with a horse, sure.

Driving or carriages are akin to walking? No.

Everybody might have the right to walk that no one can take away from them, but everybody doesn't automatically have the right to a horse and the land required to support and feed that horse, to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away, etc.

Some means of travel have wider social consequences, costs to the commons, that need to be addressed.

EDIT: Original versin of AnthonyMouse comment specifically mentioned a right to a horse and carriage.

    The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or drawing a carriage with a horse, even if cars didn't exist 200 years ago. For this to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?

[AnthonyMouse]

> everybody doesn't automatically have the right to a horse and the land required to support and feed that horse

No one is claiming that you have a right to have someone else buy you a car or a horse, any more than you have a right to have someone else buy you a radio station.

> to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away

Ordinances that require you to clean up after your animal or have emissions controls on your car are orthogonal to whether you have a right to operate one in general.

[Spooky23]

They aren’t.

When you store paper in a self-storage shed, the police need a warrant. If you store a PDF on a shared electronic system, often it’s just a subpoena.

Google “third party doctrine” and the “Stored Communications Act”

[olsonjeffery]

US Constitution worship on HN has to be, for me, one of the great disappointments for a community that regards its intelligence so highly.

The constitution is a piece of paper; it’s not internally consistent and not even rational.

[AnthonyMouse]

It is, however, federal law, and consequently the first place you start to see if something is a right under the US legal system.

[yieldcrv]

Operating a motor vehicle is a privilege

You’re free to walk

[landemva]

> Operating a motor vehicle is a privilege

True. The license to do so is a voluntary contract with State which persons may or may not sign. Alternatively, avoid "motor vehicle", and don't use words they regulate such as "operator".

Anyone in USA is free to travel in a personal conveyance for non-commercial purposes while respecting property rights of others.

> driving is a privilege

Commercial licensure of that regulated activity using those words is a privilege.

[argiopetech]

> Anyone in USA is free to travel in a personal conveyance for non-commercial purposes while respecting property rights of others.

Driving is not a privilege. Anyone with funds may purchase a vehicle and drive it on private property.

Making use of roads paved by the public (through tax dollars) is a privilege. If you've failed to support the creation and upkeep of that road (by failing to pay registration- and license-related taxes) and failed to meet the minimum requirements (license, registration, vehicle insurance or a waiver, sometimes vehicle inspections, etc....) of the body that built and upkeeps that road (a governing body: local, state, or federal), you don't have permission (and you certainly don't have a right) to drive on that road.

Even if that's not the way it "should be" (expressing no opinion here), it's the way the law enforcement and judicial branches will enforce the rules of the road on you. Sovereign citizen(-adjacent, perhaps) BS like this is only likely to escalate a traffic stop and aggravate a judge. If you don't like jail, I recommend against this line of action.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Making use of roads paved by the public (through tax dollars) is a privilege.

But this is where we get into trouble, because then the same logic would apply to walking on public roads.

And the only ingress or egress to the vast majority of residences is a public road. Otherwise the place where nearly anybody lives is fully enclosed by someone else's private property.

At which point this claim becomes "leaving your house or going back home is a privilege" which is facially unreasonable.

It also doesn't align with the way we talk about anything else. If you fail to pay your taxes you don't lose your right to a jury trial just because juries are funded by taxes. If the jury convicts you of tax evasion and the government puts you in jail, the warden will search your cell whenever he wants, but we don't say "privacy is a privilege, not a right" or claim that the government can revoke this "privilege" without due process and conviction of a crime.

And you can't get out of this by saying "but you could just walk," because in many cases you can't. The path between many locations is accessible only via limited access highway where walking is actually prohibited. It's the rule rather than the exception for the distance to be prohibitive -- it isn't reasonable to walk from one city to another, regardless of whether or not it is physically possible.

[landemva]

> Driving is not a privilege.

If you get a benefit from licensure then you should voluntarily contract with the State so you can get whatever benefits are in the licensure contract.

Traveling by personal conveyance is a right. I'm not engaged in plumbing or electrical businesses so I don't take those licenses. Same for driving. I am licensed for septic installation.

[Spooky23]

That's a distinction that's really defined by place and isn't really relevant to the problem. Perhaps your neighbor is ok with your 8 year old driving through his farm to get to another part of yours - but it quickly will fail to scale beyond that 1:1 relationship as liability is a thing. By rejecting the rules of the state, it's now your problem when your culvert fails and the 8-year old is ejected from the car and is grievously injured.

At the end of the day, because the ability to drive is a function of competence and skill, it cannot be a right. Our ancestors in the 1890-1920 period weren't wild-eyed socialists - they lived through the early days with no rules.

[AnthonyMouse]

> At the end of the day, because the ability to drive is a function of competence and skill, it cannot be a right.

Can a function of competence and skill not be a right? How do you square this with the first and second amendments, for example?

[landemva]

> liability is a thing.

Liability is always a thing. Your physical harm to people or property is separate from the scope of a fishing license or some other State contract such as a driver license.

[jonathankoren]

The 4th amendment only applies to the government, and has only ever applied to actual tangible property. This is being in public where there is no expectation of privacy.

[petsfed]

Eh, the case law here is less clear, principally because automated surveillance at this scale has never been possible before. But its also unclear because this is a tricky zone for the (mentioned elsewhere) "State Actor Doctrine". Since there are legitimate, non-government uses of e.g. license plate tracking, that means the product and service is not, obviously, a state actor. So should the 14th amendment cover it? My gut feeling is "yes", but case law doesn't (yet) reflect that.

Did the founding fathers anticipate a situation where everyone, everywhere, in public, was being surveilled, ceaselessly, in a fashion that allowed automated tools to pick out individuals, but at basically zero cost?

"No reasonable expectation of privacy" presupposes that the potential invaders of said privacy are actual living human beings, who have to be paid for their time, and thus have to sleep, eat, excrete, blink, etc. They cannot be on the job 100% of the time without incurring considerable cost. Previously, perfectly tailing someone 100% of the time was reserved for the most valuable of targets. Now it can be affordably used on somebody with overdue parking tickets. Or whomever the summer intern at one of these shops decides is cute and has an easy-to-remember license plate.

[singleshot_]

The fourth amendment, of course, also applies to private actors when they become essentially agents of the state, by taking in a role traditionally within the purview of the state, so long as the state knows of the activity, more or less. If you would like a more accurate definition, you can search for “state actor doctrine” and you will find some cases about railroads drug testing employees and parcel carriers searching packages for contraband.

[pc86]

None of which applies to a company that sells this data to anyone who wants to pay for it.

[HenryBemis]

A phrase that I learned to use recently is:

"In the private sector everything is allowed, except those that are explicitly prohibited. In the public sector everything is prohibited, except those that are explicitly allowed."

This is why in the EU (which is not a perfect society, but 'good enough'/'better than others' we got GDPR and EUDPR which cannot and should not be ignored.

If you allow the public sector to go rogue, then freedoms and right will be corroded and eventually taken away 'for our sake'.

[singleshot_]

Wait, what? The fourth amendment only applies to tangible property?

Unless I am missing something really obvious, this is deeply mistaken. I would be very interested, for example, on your take on Carpenter v. US.

[SoftTalker]

Well the 4th amendment does not mention a limitation to the government. It says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" it says nothing about limitation to government actors.

It does go on to talk about Warrants which are government instruments, and I agree that taking pictures of licence plates on public roads would not be a violation anyway.

But you can't argue that because I'm a private person, or that because TransUnion is not the government, that it's legal for us to go searching through peoples houses or papers or effects.

[bee_rider]

The constitution covers government behavior.

There are lots of other laws you’d have to worry about if you were trying to investigate somebody. Trespassing/breaking and entering for example.

[JohnFen]

This. The Bill of Rights doesn't protect us here. We need plain old lawmaking.