> If anything I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable,

> If anything I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable, and that's really what people have an issue with, but I don't think there's a great answer to that. I mean, it's one thing to say the front of my house is public info because anyone can come by and take a picture, but it sure feels different when a high resolution photo (or heck, video feed) can be posted online that is instantly available to billions of people. From your example, it's another thing to have a high resolution photo or video feed of everyone's houses and to, say, send them ads for painting services if the trim looks out of shape. I think the important thing to get in the public consciousness is that scale alone is sufficient to make information processing fundamentally different than a human interacting with a single data point. Looking up one person in the phone book and calling them or sending them a letter is different than scanning the entire book, robocalling everyone in it, and sending junk mail to all of them. The fact that the former is accepted and that the later is merely the former repeated a million times does not make the latter permissible. The former was accepted because the way the world worked meant that it was simply intractable - an economic nonstarter, a physical and logical impossibility, humanly infeasible - to abuse it into spamming a million people. For another example, license plates are public, required to be visible on your vehicle on public roads. Prior to license plate scanning technology, a cop could have tailed a suspect and radioed their vehicle description and license plate to have other detectives and officers disperse to intersections and track a vehicle through a city, and depending on the nature of the problem, they could spend a few hundred dollars to dispatch a helicopter to chase it across the freeway. They could conceivably tail a non-suspect, but that wouldn't make any sense, they were constrained by limited resources to only use this ability for a select few vehicles. That was how the world worked. Later, automated license plate readers were developed. With cameras deployed across every intersection in a city, it would be feasible to track all motions of every vehicle at all times; it would likely be cheaper and easier to do so than one year's expenses of deploying personnel to do so manually. That information should be considered public, because it obviously is, but what a person is allowed to do with public information should not be limited only by what they're able to do with it.