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The distinction makes sense, but of course the counter-argument would be: what prevented someone, using earlier forms of technology, from documenting your prese

The distinction makes sense, but of course the counter-argument would be: what prevented someone, using earlier forms of technology, from documenting your presence at that public place and then publishing it ... say in written or illustrated form? We had newspapers, illustrators, journalists and printers well before photography, microphones and the Internet. Even if we remove those media, what is to prevent someone from communicating their observations verbally and having news of your presence spread by word of mouth? A conversation between two people at a coffee shop could be transcribed by pen & paper by an eaves dropper at an adjacent table. The wait staff or owner could report your presence to whomever they choose, including the media. I'm a very private person and welcome more privacy protection, but I've always been swayed logically by the "no expectation of privacy in public" argument. As long as people can see you with your own two eyes and hear you with their own two ears, it seems to me like the existence of recorded media and more efficient distribution channels is moot.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago
What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past? Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference! For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data! A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!
- godelski 3y ago
  I think you're getting to the critical points here: - manually, non-recorded, surveillance was difficult as it required a lot of man power. It also was contingent upon the trustworthiness of the source! - Recorded surveillance was expensive and bulky, making it unlikely in the first place. - Storage of data, both physical and digital (film or tape), was expensive, bulky, and difficult to search. Now all that has changed, and in extreme ways. It is now very feasible and cheap to put up a camera to record 24/7, store that data for lengthy periods of time, and automatically search that data for cheap and in a reasonable amount of time as well. Acting like the 70's (or even 2000's) and 2020's are the same in expectations of surveillance is ludicrous at best.

LeifCarrotson 3y ago

What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past? Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference! For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data! A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!

godelski 3y ago
I think you're getting to the critical points here: - manually, non-recorded, surveillance was difficult as it required a lot of man power. It also was contingent upon the trustworthiness of the source! - Recorded surveillance was expensive and bulky, making it unlikely in the first place. - Storage of data, both physical and digital (film or tape), was expensive, bulky, and difficult to search. Now all that has changed, and in extreme ways. It is now very feasible and cheap to put up a camera to record 24/7, store that data for lengthy periods of time, and automatically search that data for cheap and in a reasonable amount of time as well. Acting like the 70's (or even 2000's) and 2020's are the same in expectations of surveillance is ludicrous at best.