There's a ton of difference between a random person noting my presence at a single point in space-time and a commercial entity tracking and storing my movements all the time.
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed. I can't find the argument I'm thinking of but it referenced how the police can sit outside your house and surveil you, but physically cannot do that to everyone all the time, and that is an inherent limit to their ability to conduct surveillance that gives you some freedoms and that limit should be respected. Making a machine that can do exactly that is not something cops are allowed to do.
The actual legal problem is that, the above does not apply to private companies. You have no fourth amendment rights from private companies. The constitution gives you no rights against companies.
So the company does exactly what the police aren't allowed to do, and then sell access to the police. For some reason, this literal circumvention of their restrictions has been explicitly allowed.
This is why Surveillance Capitalism is such a big deal. It is a direct circumvention of your explicit constitutional rights, and it just so happens to accomplish that because of the profit earned in the process. For a lot of assholes, this is the winingest of win-wins.
> Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed.
There isn’t a sweeping precedent that says “mass surveillance is illegal.
The Supreme Court has signaled concern (Knotts’ “dragnet-type” reservation; echoed in Jones/Carpenter), but mostly we rely upon older third-party/plain-view doctrines and very fact-specific scope/retention questions.
So we have things like law enforcement successfully subpoenaing gmail metadata at large scale.
The law is perhaps changing, slowly -- we have geofencing heading to the Supremes, and active litigation about ALPR.
Also, “private company” isn’t an automatic workaround—if a vendor is acting as an agent of law enforcement, Fourth Amendment limits apply.
But this is not what Flock or other ALPRs do. They do not monitor nor aggregate your movements, unless specifically asked to. Or, at least, that's how they say they're being used, and until we find evidence to the contrary (we haven't), we should take them at their word and think about the model a little differently. If no one is looking for your movements in particular, after some period of time, the data that contains evidence of your movements if deleted. The vet result for most users is a temporary record of a short history of their movements that no one ever sees, and which is permanently forgotten after some period of time.
This is like when people complain that Facebook and Google are "selling their data". They aren't, but they are doing a closely-related thing: selling access to you, based on your data. These are not the same thing, and the difference is important when it comes to finding solutions to the problems it causes!
If we all voted to ban companies like Facebook and Google from selling your data, they'd shrug and say "sure I guess, we weren't selling it anyway", and nothing would change.
If we all voted to ban Flock from "tracking all of us", they'd shrug and say "that's already true" and it would not have any impact on their operations.
What we should instead vote for is strict controls over how long they can store the data, and how it is allowed to be used, and apply steep penalties for its misuse or unauthorized disclosure.
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.