There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers.

Edit: Note that this is not an endorsement, rather stating that recent supreme court cases may not be applicable.

Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t properly articulate what the legal difference is. And if there isn’t one then the law needs change. Clearly the majority of citizens agree with me.

Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time?

Seems like a good idea at this point.

The language doesn't really cover things correctly.

You don't expect privacy in public in the sense that you might bump into other people that know who you are.

That doesn't automatically mean that you expect walking into a public area means a system will start investigating you and seeing if you match with crimes.

Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.

>There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.

And that's the problem, because if there isn't an expectation of privacy, and we record everything that's "in public", we land in a dystopic hellscape.

The problem is really that "privacy" vs. "public" isn't a binary choice. Yes, I expect people to see me in public if they happen to walk by. That's quite different from every movement being recorded and made searchable. Most privacy laws don't really account for that being possible.

Rehnquist anticipated but unfortunately did not prevent the abuse of the third party doctrine back in 1983.

“Respondent does not actually quarrel with this analysis, though he expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the "reality hardly suggests abuse," If such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.” — United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 284 (1983)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/460/276

"

The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties, such as banks and phone companies, generally have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. This precedent, established in Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, allows the U.S. government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Flock goes far beyond that, they allow the government to retroactively string together a person's history of movement. Prior cases establish that continuous and retrospective tracking like that violates a reasonable expectation of privacy and requires a warrant.

They are relevant and courts have considered the whole of a persons movements standard in terms of whether querying ALPR data constitutes a search, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-s...

Under current case law (Carpenter and recently affirmed in Chatrie) it will definitely be a search, IMO it is just when the sensors become dense enough according to the court (absent states do not make regulation themselves to require a warrant for historical data).

> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent

This is _not_ universal. Many jurisdictions take a different view on this.

> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.

Which is entirely different from an expectation of a generalized systematic loss of practical privacy in public.

They are not even close to the same thing.

The willingness to kneel to others baffles me. Loss of practical privacy is loss of power - to somebody(s). It may not seem so for one person. But when it is true for everyone, the system will adapt to using that power.

Throw in AI and data integration. This is clearly a B.A.D. idea.

> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.

Surely we can agree the point of this technology is to change the level of privacy one should reasonably expect in public?

Prompting a system to give a history of a person’s movements (even if they’re movements “in public”) is not something that has any historical analogy. The law has slapped down the “it’s in public” argument in cases like this, see eg Baltimore’s ubiquitous aerial surveillance (they put a wide-angle lense on a surveillance plane and recorded everything, so they could rewind and search anyone’s locations.)

I don't think that's actually true. Follow someone around reading their phone over their shoulder and see how people react.

Yes, there is an expectation in the history of free society that the government is not proactively observing every person on every block, asking for ID, and following them down the streets, then documenting that and correlating it with other people's activities and making it accessible to law enforcement personnel without a warrant across the country.

I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.

All that means is that the ends (and not the means) are the determining factor.

A private company can have plenty of legitimate reasons to film in public spaces, and to incidentally film people.

Flock's ends are to explicitly track people, and to use that data to accuse them of criminal activity. Those are the ends that the 4th amendment is written to explicit protect us from that, and not exclusively from governments, either.

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Isn't there a difference between getting picked up on someones Tik Tok "broadcast" and a private/public surveillance operation?

In human terms, frequency, impact, and scale matter. If my little dog puts a few ounces of pee in some random person's front yard, it's seen as a micro-infraction at best. Vs. Flock's ideal is more like a factory farm just up the hill, with ever-leaking urine retention ponds.

Without any real privacy laws, Americans should not have the expectation of privacy in private spaces either. Your search history, real time location, biometric data, consumer habits etc. are all for sale to anyone who wants it.

Cool we should maybe change those laws then, these definitions of privacy came about in a world where there weren't cameras on everyones face and front porch.

The US government, the 4th reich, cannot be trusted with these tools, especially their law enforcement.