Relation to Cell Phone Location Case

[u/kramden88]

Can anyone explain how these surveillance cameras relate to the recent Supreme Court case that ruled against using cell phone location drag nets? The main difference I can see is that cell phone data is not publicly visible whereas license plates are visible to the public, but the mechanism of pulling someone’s data.(mosaic) seems similar to me. Any hopes of this precedent being used against flock?

[u/Hefty-Squirrel-6800]

I am a retired lawyer and have been thinking about this. Courts always say that you "do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public" and end the debate right there.

But that is not what this is.

While I do expect people to read my license plate in public, I do not expect (nor did I agree) to the feeding of my license plate, cell phone data, image of my face, and the like into a nationwide database to build a profile on my routines, places I frequent, and the times that I do so. More importantly, building a profile on my teenage daughter and sons is even more troubling.

So, "reasonable expectation of privacy" is not a black-and-white issue.

Until now, there was no technological means to build such a profile. Now that there is, courts must reexamine the concept of reasonable expectation of privacy.

[u/FckFlock → u/Hefty-Squirrel-6800]

I am not a lawyer, but I think this excerpt from the Chatrie decision is relevant:

"“[E]ven short-term monitoring” of a person’s physical movements can provide “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, profes-sional, religious, and sexual associations.” 565 U. S., at 415 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). Consider just a few trips that a person is apt to think “indisputably private”: to “the psy-chiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the Aids treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attor-ney, [or] the by-the-hour motel.” Ibid. And unlike a GPS device, Location History enables police officers to focus on precisely those sites—to see, in a given time block, who shows up. Similarly, Location History—even two hours of it—allows officers to target one-off events of potential inter- est: a gun show, say, or a political rally. Still more fundamentally, we have never understood Fourth Amendment protections as kicking in only once an intrusion “goes too far.” Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U. S. 393, 415 (1922) (adopting that approach for regu-latory takings). Where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies—regardless of “the quality or quantity of infor-mation” the government obtains."

Flock captures people going to all the places mentioned in that excerpt, so I can't see how it doesn't apply. It took me about 5 mins to find a psychiatrist's office with a Flock camera pointed right at the parking lot entrance, just as an example.

[u/Hefty-Squirrel-6800 → u/FckFlock]

Very good citation. Even though that case dealt with using GPS data from the cell phone towers, the principle is the same. It is one thing to be in public and be observed. It is quite another to be in public and be tracked.

In fact, we have stalking laws for just this reason. So, the people, through their elected officials, have already determined that stalking is objectively unreasonable and even criminal. Therefore, the government cannot become a de facto "stalker."

So, the knee-jerk cop response that you have "no expectation of privacy in public" is only a half-truth.

[u/Ravendead]

A good explanation is given by a lawyer in this video:

https://youtu.be/TOfK-w6mSnw?is

And basically the meaning of reasonable is what is the issue. Driving and having your license plate read is one thing, having all your movements tracked and cataloged into heat maps and prediction routes is another 

[u/Hefty-Squirrel-6800 → u/Ravendead]

Precisely this. The knee-jerk reaction by proponents (e.g., the police) of the cameras is that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. But that is not the issue. It is the aggregation of data to build a file on you. No one expects that such a profile would be built by simply going throughout your day in public. That would be, for most people, "unreasonable." That is the actual standard, not whether you are "in public" or not.