Watching the Watchers: EFF: “You Really Do Have Some Expectation of Privacy in Public”

​Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, said thanks to AI-enabled public surveillance, “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Matthew Guariglia and Lisa Femia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation push back on the common sentiment from surveillance advocates that you are wrong to have an expectation of privacy when you go about in public.
 
“Today’s technology can effortlessly track your location over time, collect sensitive intimate information about you, keep a retrospective record of this data that may be stored for months, years, or indefinitely. This data can be collected for any purpose, or even for none at all. And taken in the aggregate, this data can paint a detailed picture of your daily life – a picture that is more cheaply and easily accessed by the government than ever before.
 
“Because of this, we’re at risk of exposing more information about ourselves in public than we were in decades past. This, in turn, affects how we think about privacy in public. While your expectation of privacy is certainly different in public than it would be in your private home, there is no legal rule that says you lose all expectation of privacy whenever you’re in a public place.”
 
In fact, EFF notes that the 2018 landmark Supreme Court opinion in Carpenter v. United States, the Court wished to preserve “the degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”