There has been though - it wasn't perfect, but there was the expectation that people generally forgot about enough that in practice you were private so long as you were not obvious. Now computers/cameras can store data on everyone as opposed to just people acting "abnormal".
That’s just simply incorrect. There are plenty of expectations of privacy in public. For example, it is illegal to look up a woman’s skirt, and it is illegal for police to arbitrarily search someone, etc.
Now, what is reasonably expected in public is less than what is reasonably expected in private, but it certainly isn’t zero privacy.
It is true that one might expect, if they are driving around, that someone might see them. But is it expected that they might sometimes be followed? Is it expected that they are always followed? Is it expected that everyone is followed and those locations are cataloged indefinitely for anyone to FOIA? These are all very different questions.
While technically correct, it also wasn’t possible to invade people’s privacy this discreetly at this scale.
It’s one thing for a subject of an active investigation to be tailed by a cop. It is an entirely different thing for the entire population of Roanoke to pass through what are essentially checkpoints logging your location a dozen or more times in a day.
I care less about public privacy than about how these things are also invading private spaces. Surveillance piggybacked on all the modern tech that we allowed into our homes.
There’s never been an expectation of our whereabouts and activities continuously recorded in detail and stored in perpetuity, for purchase and later use against us. Even the Stasi did not achieve surveillance to this extent.
This is the "scale invariant fallacy." When you're in public you can be casually observed by people or followed by police if they happen to be interested in you. And so therefore observing every person's movements in public 24/7 with perfect detail
and memory must be also okay like these aren't two very different things.
Scale can change the fundamental nature of a thing: walking down the street while being pissed as your government is one thing, but if you get 1000 friends to do it with you it's a march.
