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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Do people have a right to not be identified in public? In public, your right to privacy doesn't protect you from having your picture being taken. Then, what if someone identifies you from your picture? How about if they use a CV system to speed it up? What's the argument here?

BTW, as I expand upon below, I'm against surveillance of private communications, I think we all are. As far as I understand it, this is not surveillance, this is identification technology, which is different.

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Scale matters.

If it were only warm-blooded individual humans identifying you, there wouldn't be much potential for abuse. In the 1960s, your privacy was pretty much preserved even in public spaces. Unless you were a genuine person of interest, worthy of expending costly observational resources.

Now? Drive anywhere, walk anywhere - machines log your travels. It's a perfect recipe for abuse. Just scale, is all it takes.

The poison is in the dose.

At one time, rock stars were essentially anonymous and could have relatively normal lives when not on tour. The audience was huge and they were essentially faceless.

Then TV, music videos and the practice of having huge screens broadcasting the faces of the band to the audience ruined that.

KISS used face paint and that helped protect their identity, but when they got too big, you saw Gene Simmons wearing a mask on dates to try to preserve his privacy, yet everyone knew the masked guy was Gene Simmons.

It’s one thing for you to go out in public, it’s another thing when “public” follows you around like a private investigator snapping photos of you everywhere. The right to privacy is the right to be able to go about your business unimpeded. It’s a core idea on which the bill of rights was founded. It’s not written of course, but I’d argue it’s a fundamental human right.

The Bill of Rights was written in an era when most Americans lived in small towns where everyone was recognized everywhere. The anonymity of urban and metropolitan life is perhaps a happy accident, but it wouldn’t have been perceived as a fundamental right to people living in a predominantly rural country.

The Bill of Rights was also written in an era without systematic government ID or national police system, when you could live or travel in near perfect anonymity if you just left the small town where everyone knew you.

So I think the perception goes both ways.

Additionally, the bill of rights was written in an era when there were no laws about immigration to the US at all. The US had completely open borders at that time, anybody could move there if they chose.

It should also be pointed out that, at the time, cross-Atlantic travel was expensive and few people in North America outside of the US had any interest in immigrating.[1] Additionally, American independence ended the transportation of British prisoners to the colonies and severely limited the amount of indentured servant immigration.

[1] During the colonial era, the bigger problem was the risk of white settlers emigrating to a nearby American Indian community. For example, it's likely that the entire colony of Roanoke did this. Even as late as the 19th century, white children captured and raised by the Comanche almost exclusively chose to continue living as Comanche even after being given the chance to return.

if you moved towns, nobody would know who you are

> In public, your right to privacy doesn't protect you from having your picture being taken.

I believe it does in some places, for example France.

Rules on the sort of thing are not universal. Europe collectively (continent not union) cares a bit less about freedom of speech, quite a bit more about privacy, compared to the USA.

Yea but it's yucky, trump is president and I wanna remain morally pure

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