Privacy and public spaces (was: Complacency)

[Russell Turpin]

>> The fact that you're on camera when you're walking 
>> down the street might be creepy, but the fact is that 
>> this is information that has *always* been available to
>> the public sphere anyway. 

On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Paul Sholtz wrote:
> That's absolutely wrong. The concentration of flatfoots
> in a given area has always been small, and their 
> recognition capabilities limited to few 10 individuals at 
> best, and that information was coupled with very high
> latency to paper/flesh machines with ridiculous latency 
> and processivity.

There is an irony is the courts' claim that no one 
has an expectation of privacy in public areas. In 
fact, public areas are where we have our greatest 
privacy, in many regards. The fact that no one 
knows where you are, that it (formerly) was 
impossible to effectively survey public areas, and
the general difficulty of picking out specific acts
within a crowd have made public areas the ideal
setting for conversations or exchanges where 
the parties want guaranteed privacy. This 
guaranteed privacy in much the same way that 
a hash function guarantees uniqueness, or that
public key encryption guarantees secrecy: 
by virtue of probability and great numbers. It
turns out that the "highly probable" privacy of 
a public space was not secure against the 
evolution of future technology. 

Russell