I know what you mean but read this in context. You're less restricted in what you can collect compared to what you can do with it - any valid use case requiring video footage allows you to get video footage but that doesn't mean you can then do anything you want with it. The key is what are you using the data for.

And less restricted does not mean no restriction.

Having someone else pick up (IE buy) your prescription is legal and commonplace for obvious reasons. https://legalclarity.org/can-someone-else-pick-up-my-prescri...

Thus I’m regularly allowed to buy drugs I’m not legally allowed to use. “Using a prescription medication that was not prescribed to you is illegal under both federal and state laws.” https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-use-someone-elses-...

Don't the industry-imposed rules for handling credit cards work that way (restricting use of data you already have) though?

Like, I thought a big part of why some stores do loyalty cards is because they enable tracking things that they'd get their credit card privileges revoked if they tracked that way.

>It's like allowing people to buy drugs, but not to use them.

Well, since you mention it: I have prescription drugs that I am allowed to buy, but I am NOT allowed to abuse them. I must take exactly 1 each day.

> 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem.

But this is exactly what is covered - incidentally collected information cannot be used for other purposes. That's rather the point - you must collect things for a specific use case and you can't use it without permission for other cases.

> I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable.

It's no less verifiable than "don't collect the data", and hiding it requires increasingly larger conspiracies the larger organisation you are looking at. People are capable of committing crimes though, sure.

If you flag the dozen or so people that come in to your business once a week to steal, you don't have to have as much surveillance in the store otherwise. Just check them out when they enter, very simple.

For instance, Costco has a much lower theft rate (0.11–0.2% of sales) compared to other supermarkets (1-4%) simply because they manage to keep criminal out through membership fees. Control the entrance, target the known criminals and we can go back to a high trust society.

I don't really understand their reasoning behind the "technology of convenience" point.

Say I implement facial recognition anti-fraud via an army of super-recognizers sitting in an office, watching the camera feeds all day (collecting the sensitive information into their brains rather than into a computer system). It'd be more expensive and involve employing staff (both the "technology of convenience" criteria. From a consumer perspective the privacy impact is very similar, but somehow the privacy commissioner would interpret this differently?

Maybe that is the point the privacy commissioner is trying to make, that collecting this information through an automated computer system is fundamentally different than collecting this information through an analog/human system. But I'm not sure the line is really so clear...

Very well could be that I am misreading it.

In Australia we expect companies to follow the rule of law, which encodes the expectations of society.

The Australian Privacy Act falls well short of European standards, but it does encode some rights for people that businesses must abide by.

> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?

Unless you think a grocery store should be allowed to grab you and sell your organs then you agree that this private organisation should be subject to some limitations about what it can do on its own land. The question is then where the line should be between its interests and the interests of those who go on the land.

You can be absolutist about this, that’s certainly a position, but it’s extremely far from mainstream.

>Who doesn't expect to be recorded when entering a retail chain?

Me. Unless it's clearly stated outside. It's why I wear a covid mask when shopping.

> How the hell does the government have the right to decide

It generally owns more weapons than your average deluded shop owner.

> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?

Because the world is bigger than just the wishes of private businesses. I don't think there is anywhere on this planet where you as a private business can do literally whatever you want, there are always regulations about what you can and cannot do. The first thing is usually "zoning" as one example, so regardless if you own the land, if it isn't zoned for industrial/commercial usage, then you cannot use it for industrial/commercial usage.

What libertarian utopia do you live in that would allow land owners to do whatever they want?