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Comment by jpc0 | Hacker News Reader

There is a distinction I tend to make here.

If some person was able to pick me out from a lineup because they physically saw me then that wasn't private and privacy laws don't apply.

So for instance capturing my face on CCTV in a public place isn't a privacy violation, same with my license plate in a pulic place.

However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent.

Certian information isn't private, and that being stored is fine. Where the line gets drawn is what's up for debate.

I surely would want my contact details and name saved by a company that I intend to do business with in either direction. However if they spam me with information I should be able to lodge an harrassment claim against them. It's not a privacy issue but a decency issue.

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> However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent.

And the biggest enablers of violation are things like ring doorbells and dashcams. There is no comeback in my country, don’t know about the US.

Governmental and commercial cctv has checks and balances. Domestic just goes onto planet wide databases with no control.

That notion isn't universal. In Germany, for instance, I can't install a camera pointing to the street.

I understand that completely. Just wanted to give a different viewpoint on that.

I'm all for finding a balance, it's just that many times people are against surveillance that does actually improve security or enforcement but mildy infringes on their "rights" when in reality they never had privacy in that situation to start with and the use of technology didn't substantially change that.

Youtube being forced to give up personal information based on who viewed a video is something I don't see as an issue. How is this any different from any other website getting the exact same order?

If you are doing something shady you know how to obfuscate that information, if you aren't, sure your "privacy" was "violated" for sure but it was violated in a way that was legally allowed and by law enforcement at that.

Living in a surveillance state where I have no choice but for the government to be able to track every single transaction I make financially and being able to link my cell number amongst other details directly to me, I feel like if I had to try to fight that I would only be causing myself undue anxiety and I've got enough legitimate reasons to be anxious.

Thank you for so eloquently explaining the bootlicking and privacy not caring mindset I’ve never understood. Also sorry that I can’t come up with a less worse way to say that

"Hunters don't kill the innocent animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!

If they're not guilty, why are they running?"

I never said any of that.

What I said is for this specific point a smart criminal won't get caught and you too can very easily obfuscate that very same data.

> and the use of technology didn't substantially change that.

This is complete BS. Technology made it scalable to track where everyone is and query it historically. This used to require tailing someone so it couldn’t be done at scale.

That same technology has also dramatically increased the cost of doing that.

Data isn't free and processing big data isn't cheap. As much as Google has the data, that means they need to store that data.

You know what used to happen before and still happens now, an example. I live in a restricted access area. Restricted in the sense rhat to get in some guy needs to take your name and license plate.

For many many businesses parks in my country that is still the defacto. There isn't really a camera watching that other than general CCTV that probably doesn't have the resolution to pick up text on our license plates. It's cheaper for them to literally pay a guy to stand at a boom and get that information than to install the technology required to track that automatically.

> Data isn't free

The adtech industry made data and its processing not just free (as in more than covered by the ad revenue) but outright profitable.

This is frankly a one-in-a-lifetime gift to the government because we've not only built an unaccountable industrial-grade spying machine but the government doesn't even have to pay for it as it pays for itself and incentivizes its own expansion.

> It's cheaper for them to literally pay a guy to stand at a boom and get that information than to install the technology required to track that automatically.

It depends of the local cost of labor, also the technology is easier to scale, imagine New York City having employees at the bridges writing all the entering license plates! And searching through those records how many times a certain plate entered the city on a given time frame. To me the problem with technology is that they’re used for lazy policing to just inflate the numbers of solved cases. There were cases of cops feeding hand-drawn suspects to face recognition software. Every case becomes a “throw something to the wall and see what sticks”.

Your complaint seems more like a failing legal system than unnecessary surveillance.

Legitimately if an investigator put a hard drawn sketch through facial recognition and that was even remotely allowed into evidence by the court then the suspect evidence wasn't the issue

I don’t recall the actual case but what I try to point out is that technologies are used as dragnets to “fish anything” be it facial recognition, cell tower logs or license plate reads. I’m all out in favor of using any tool to catch criminals but not to manufacture them, specially when the only goal is revenues for the agency du jour.

>Youtube being forced to give up personal information based on who viewed a video is something I don't see as an issue. How is this any different from any other website getting the exact same order?

Scale. This isn't "supbpeona to get all of Bob's info", it's "subpeona to get information on all of the people's info tangentially related to bob". Imagine if this was as tangential as "who watched this video with 10m views"? is the YT history of 10m people worth it? Is it even useful?

The issue comes down to whether or not "Youtube" is a public place. All logistical terms point to "no", hence this story.

>your "privacy" was "violated" for sure but it was violated in a way that was legally allowed and by law enforcement at that.

That isn't how court orders work. They cannot make a single order to search an entire neighborhood's worth of houses because of drugs or whatever. That'd be N orders which may or may not go through based on the arguments made.

Unless you're wealthy and powerful.

I guarantee the very wealthy or politically powerful have plenty of very-well-hidden cameras surrounding their properties.

Those rules are to keep you from catching and proving the powerful doing something they shouldn't.

I... well, I will be honest, this is the first time I've heard someone arguing that street facing CCTV was meant to catch _that_ kind of wrongdoing.

For the German context, and for the kind of CCTV I'm talking about, it makes no sense thou.

Are businesses allowed to install cameras facing the street?

> If some person was able to pick me out from a lineup because they physically saw me then that wasn't private and privacy laws don't apply

It’s not an invasion of privacy. But it is a problem for other reasons

https://nobaproject.com/modules/eyewitness-testimony-and-mem....

So, when your in your own property, cellular tower shouldn't be allowed to allow your mobile phone to register? Because they will record your IMEI while you are in your private property.

Yeah but the electro-magnetic spectrum is a limited public good. You don’t own your broadcasted radio waves in the same way you own your house. Your cellphone is a pollutant.

Both the radio waves his cell phone emits, and the information (voltage change of an ADSL line or photons moving in an optic fiber) used to communicate over the Internet, actually leave his home, and then are registered. So I think in nature it's the same as sending a letter. So let's symmetrically consider that you send a letter, and police/agency asks the post office to attach to each letter information (from, to, weight, stamp...) the phone number from their database. If that happens for all letters going through a given sorting room, I can understand how that's an abuse.

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