I think they should be allowed to point it at places inside their store, with prominent disclosure to people entering.
I don't think they should be allowed to point it at the public sidewalk.
I don't think they should be allowed to point it at the public sidewalk.
If I decide to take a picture of what's going on outside my house for no reason at all, should that also be allowed?
if I decide to put a camera in my living room pointed out the window and record, should that be allowed?
If I decide to run a business out of my home, does that change anything?
Some things that are not much of a problem at a small scale ("take a picture of a specific strange thing you see happening", "record one license plate of a specific car in relation to an incident") can become a problem at scale ("set up a video camera to constantly surveil the sidewalk and do facial recognition on it", "record every license plate that goes by and correlate your recordings with a million other people to generate a tracking map").
The problem is with pervasive surveillance, not discrete observation, and that's the spirit that laws about surveillance should attempt to uphold.
That doesn't seem accurate. Do you have an example of a law that prohibits filming on public property? Isn't the legality the whole premise of what those weirdo "first amendment auditors" on YouTube do?
Note that in this comment I'm talking about audio recording, which typically has much stricter regulations than video recording. I think the same principles should apply to video, and in some jurisdictions they do. But in my comment, I was using the laws around audio recordings vs physical eavesdropping to make an analogy about the problem of pervasive surveillance.