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There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to

• someguyiguess 26d ago
  Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t properly articulate what the legal difference is. And if there isn’t one then the law needs change. Clearly the majority of citizens agree with me. Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time? Seems like a good idea at this point.
  • pydry 26d ago
    already happening and it seems it is legal https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/citizens-are-tracking-ice-real-time-warn-migrants-is-that-legal-2025-09-04/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/citizens-are-tracki...
    • DrScientist 26d ago
      Another area that's also existed for quite a while is the crowd-sourcing of the positions of mobile speed traps. Though bizarrely in the UK that's legal if you do it via Waze, not if you do it via whatsapp.
  • EvanAnderson 26d ago
    The quickest way to get dragnet surveillance banned would be for citizens to collaborate and create a massive publicly-available surveillance network.
    • sicktriple 26d ago
      Yes. Once the application of force happens outside the state's monopoly, they'll shut that shit down so fast.
      • bilbo0s 26d ago
        I loathe surveillance networks. As much as I loathe them, I'm sadly forced to concede that probably citizens setting up a trivially join-able, anonymous, open source surveillance network is probably the only way to get the powerful to think about what they're doing. Every door man, every hotel employee, every uber driver, every concert-goer, every grocery shopper, every student, and on and on and on. Anonymously streaming their encrypted feeds. Have them turn their cameras onto the street. Especially, say, in front of hotels or at certain restaurants and resorts. Ohhh, and at convention centers as well. Just to show it can pick out subjects at busy places and track them around any city reliably. Naturally, we'd need some sample facial recognition queries just to show how to use the system. We could start with, say, public figures like Representatives, and Senators? And just to prove it works for less famous people, maybe we could have some example names of regular, everyday employees. Like employees at, I don't know?? Palantir, Flock and Clearview maybe? Just to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of public surveillance networks.
      • deltoidmaximus 26d ago
        I guess I'm more cynical at this point. This isn't the 1970s when a congressman freaked out that his video rental history might leak and passed a law making them private for everyone as cover. They've evolved beyond that. They'll pass a law banning it for individuals but leaving a loophole for themselves. Like how Chat Control always contains a provision so that officials messages aren't a part of the dragnet.
    • WaitWaitWha 26d ago
      ... of politicians. Because they are the ones who could write the laws to ban privacy invasive solutions.
    • arealaccount 26d ago
      Good luck getting permits to install your citizen flock in public areas.
  • Supermancho 26d ago
    > Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. The reason these strategies (for the same goal) don't seem equivalent is due to the nature of oversight. Flock as a centralized private company governed by a procedural system, can be corrupted and abused more easily than a distributed network. Flock's systems have already been abused and will continue to be. Re Title: Flock doesn't "want" anything in particular, other than to sell more contracts and make more money.
  • wavemode 26d ago
    > Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time? Sure. There's absolutely nothing illegal about monitoring the location and activity of police (unless you broke some other law to do so, like hacking). Hell, most of them will simply tell you where they are and what they're doing, as they tend to broadcast over unencrypted radio (which is also not illegal to listen to).
    • ethagnawl 26d ago
      > There's absolutely nothing illegal about monitoring the location and activity of police In theory, sure. In practice? Good luck. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/10/03/apple-takes-down-iceblock-app-after-doj-demand-heres-what-we-know/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/10/03/apple-t...
  • planckscnst 26d ago
    Yes, it's different. It's a legal doctrine called mosaic theory. https://share.google/f10FzHcf2jPqSzTRM https://share.google/f10FzHcf2jPqSzTRM
• unethical_ban 26d ago
  Yes, there is an expectation in the history of free society that the government is not proactively observing every person on every block, asking for ID, and following them down the streets, then documenting that and correlating it with other people's activities and making it accessible to law enforcement personnel without a warrant across the country. I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.
• perlgeek 26d ago
  >There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. And that's the problem, because if there isn't an expectation of privacy, and we record everything that's "in public", we land in a dystopic hellscape. The problem is really that "privacy" vs. "public" isn't a binary choice. Yes, I expect people to see me in public if they happen to walk by. That's quite different from every movement being recorded and made searchable. Most privacy laws don't really account for that being possible.
  • hdgvhicv 26d ago
    Likewise being recorded on a cctv camera which sits on a vhs for a few weeks and then is consulted when a crime has occurred is very different to being recorded on a camera and being immediately processed, analysed, and information kept forever, including “person X arrived at time Y accompanied by person Z” It’s a question of scale and ability.
• dakolli 26d ago
  Cool we should maybe change those laws then, these definitions of privacy came about in a world where there weren't cameras on everyones face and front porch. The US government, the 4th reich, cannot be trusted with these tools, especially their law enforcement.
• stuaxo 26d ago
  The language doesn't really cover things correctly. You don't expect privacy in public in the sense that you might bump into other people that know who you are. That doesn't automatically mean that you expect walking into a public area means a system will start investigating you and seeing if you match with crimes. Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.
  • bilbo0s 26d ago
    >Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works. Well that's not exactly how it would work. Everyone is tracked, but only certain people are watched. That added to the fact that any nation with a sufficiently complex legal system has no law abiding residents. You've always broken some law, somewhere. So it would be more like: >[Pick any person from] everyone in public [and the system has the capacity to list the reasons why that person] is a [criminal]
    • empyrrhicist 26d ago
      These systems aren't perfect recognition oracles - there are lots of errors, especially as you scale up the technology. At the end of the day, it's a probabilistic identification correlated to a stream with a mix of of reported or suspected crimes. Your framing completely misses the reality. I'd argue that the OP's language is a much better fit.
    • lp0_on_fire 26d ago
      > Everyone is tracked, but only certain people are watched. The "only certain people are watched" hinges on pinky swears, winks, and nods. IMO it's a distinction without a difference.
  • ethagnawl 26d ago
    It's the same with all of these issues; the frog always gets boiled. In the same way the people who drafted the Constitution/Bill of Rights couldn't have imagined AR-15s, they could never have imagined a (practical) surveillance network capable of tracking people (historically and in real-time) in the way Flock, Axon and these other shady fucks do.
• OGWhales 26d ago
  Flock goes far beyond that, they allow the government to retroactively string together a person's history of movement. Prior cases establish that continuous and retrospective tracking like that violates a reasonable expectation of privacy and requires a warrant.
• ceejayoz 26d ago
  > There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Surely we can agree the point of this technology is to change the level of privacy one should reasonably expect in public?
• harimau777 26d ago
  I don't think that's actually true. Follow someone around reading their phone over their shoulder and see how people react.
• fmobus 26d ago
  > There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent This is _not_ universal. Many jurisdictions take a different view on this.
• leonidasrup 26d ago
  " The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties, such as banks and phone companies, generally have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. This precedent, established in Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, allows the U.S. government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
  • deleted 26d ago
    [deleted]
  • ceejayoz 26d ago
    It's like allowing police departments to hire a hitman to avoid the Fifth Amendment.
  • thomastjeffery 26d ago
    I'm not voluntarily sharing my license plate number. I'm legally required to display it.
• apwheele 26d ago
  They are relevant and courts have considered the whole of a persons movements standard in terms of whether querying ALPR data constitutes a search, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-searches-should-require-a-warrant/ https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-s... Under current case law (Carpenter and recently affirmed in Chatrie) it will definitely be a search, IMO it is just when the sensors become dense enough according to the court (absent states do not make regulation themselves to require a warrant for historical data).
• matthewdgreen 26d ago
  Prompting a system to give a history of a person’s movements (even if they’re movements “in public”) is not something that has any historical analogy. The law has slapped down the “it’s in public” argument in cases like this, see eg Baltimore’s ubiquitous aerial surveillance (they put a wide-angle lense on a surveillance plane and recorded everything, so they could rewind and search anyone’s locations.)
• bparsons 26d ago
  Without any real privacy laws, Americans should not have the expectation of privacy in private spaces either. Your search history, real time location, biometric data, consumer habits etc. are all for sale to anyone who wants it.
• Nevermark 26d ago
  > There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Which is entirely different from an expectation of a generalized systematic loss of practical privacy in public. They are not even close to the same thing. The willingness to kneel to others baffles me. Loss of practical privacy is loss of power - to somebody(s). It may not seem so for one person. But when it is true for everyone, the system will adapt to using that power. Throw in AI and data integration. This is clearly a B.A.D. idea.
• guns 26d ago
  Rehnquist anticipated but unfortunately did not prevent the abuse of the third party doctrine back in 1983. “Respondent does not actually quarrel with this analysis, though he expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the "reality hardly suggests abuse," If such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.” — United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 284 (1983) https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/460/276 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/460/276
• bell-cot 26d ago
  In human terms, frequency, impact, and scale matter. If my little dog puts a few ounces of pee in some random person's front yard, it's seen as a micro-infraction at best. Vs. Flock's ideal is more like a factory farm just up the hill, with ever-leaking urine retention ponds.
• apercu 26d ago
  Isn't there a difference between getting picked up on someones Tik Tok "broadcast" and a private/public surveillance operation?
• thomastjeffery 26d ago
  All that means is that the ends (and not the means) are the determining factor. A private company can have plenty of legitimate reasons to film in public spaces, and to incidentally film people. Flock's ends are to explicitly track people, and to use that data to accuse them of criminal activity. Those are the ends that the 4th amendment is written to explicit protect us from that, and not exclusively from governments, either. > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.