[theshrike79]

The laws for this were written when "public photography" was someone with a film camera. It was maybe valid in the digital camera era.

But now I can point a camera at a crowd and It will:

  - count the number of people and animals there
  - give me an estimated gender for each
  - analyse the sentiment of each person
  - save their facial features so I can find "Male-sg76fg" in future photos automatically
  - store the GPS location

All this with consumer gear I can carry with me, no government level spy gadgets needed. All live at 2-20fps depending on how much hardware I throw at it.

With some extra work I can then find each of them on social media, grab their real names and other information from public sources and now I have a surveillance database. (Illegal where I live, but who's gonna check?)

This makes "public photography" a whole different thing from what it used to be.

[flir]

If the tech is there, in the long run the only question is: Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it? Privacy may have been a temporary phenomenon - a side-effect of the anonymity of cities/large crowds. You didn't have it in the mediaeval village, and you probably won't have it in the global village.

(David Brin's been beating this drum for about three decades now - I doubt I could say anything he hasn't already said. https://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html)

[nosianu]

> Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it?

That is a strange dichotomy, "government vs everyone". You miss the much more important large private organizations.

Government can at least be held accountable, if voters are willing. What the private orgs do you don't even have a chance to know about without a (tragic doomed person) whistleblower. Even the "evil" government actions heavily uses those unaccountable private entities for much of the dirty work.

Also "everyone" is useless. What use is any of it to individuals? Weapons or information. The fight is among deep complex organizations. Individuals - unless part of some network - may as well not exist. The individual with a firearm as a protection against government comes to mind, even in groups they'll be blown away anytime the organized large groups even sneeze towards them.

Another example is who uses the law: Any large company or even the government is much much MUCH more effective, no matter how much an individual has law on their side, at least when the large organization is willing to drag out the fight until the individual or small group runs out of resources.

If you want to achieve something, ORGANIZE! Otherwise you just throw yourself into the grinder, at best even providing reasons and justification to the other side.

[flir]

> unless part of some network

Totally agreed. Even if that network is as simple as posting something to social media and watching it go viral, it's still a network.

I thought about breaking commerical interests out separately in my post, but didn't want to overcomplicate. An example would be the V888 form in the UK, which allows you to request the details of the licenced keeper of a vehicle, as long as you can show "reasonable cause". The reasonable causes are, of course, mostly commercial.

[theshrike79]

Even normal POS units have been discovered to have facial identification like that years ago.

You're tapping and paying and the system stores your purchase under "male, 35-45, hispanic, anxious"...

Creepy as all hell.