The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that.
The next one, which I didn’t fully understand, but appeared to be in response to a swatting incident where the culprit is believed to have watched a specific camera livestream and the police provided a lot of narrowing details (time period, certain other characteristics, etc) appears far more legitimate.
They asked for information about a video watched 30k times. Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio, who heavily influenced the founding fathers.
I don't think any of this appears legitimate.
Edit: Ops [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have.
Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times.
Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera?
Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location.
Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care.
The Snowden files changed nothing. If there was ever a point in history where people would have given up their cell phones for their civil liberties, that would have been the time to do it.
If some person was able to pick me out from a lineup because they physically saw me then that wasn't private and privacy laws don't apply.
So for instance capturing my face on CCTV in a public place isn't a privacy violation, same with my license plate in a pulic place.
However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent.
Certian information isn't private, and that being stored is fine. Where the line gets drawn is what's up for debate.
I surely would want my contact details and name saved by a company that I intend to do business with in either direction. However if they spam me with information I should be able to lodge an harrassment claim against them. It's not a privacy issue but a decency issue.
I'm all for finding a balance, it's just that many times people are against surveillance that does actually improve security or enforcement but mildy infringes on their "rights" when in reality they never had privacy in that situation to start with and the use of technology didn't substantially change that.
Youtube being forced to give up personal information based on who viewed a video is something I don't see as an issue. How is this any different from any other website getting the exact same order?
If you are doing something shady you know how to obfuscate that information, if you aren't, sure your "privacy" was "violated" for sure but it was violated in a way that was legally allowed and by law enforcement at that.
Living in a surveillance state where I have no choice but for the government to be able to track every single transaction I make financially and being able to link my cell number amongst other details directly to me, I feel like if I had to try to fight that I would only be causing myself undue anxiety and I've got enough legitimate reasons to be anxious.
This is complete BS. Technology made it scalable to track where everyone is and query it historically. This used to require tailing someone so it couldn’t be done at scale.
Data isn't free and processing big data isn't cheap. As much as Google has the data, that means they need to store that data.
You know what used to happen before and still happens now, an example. I live in a restricted access area. Restricted in the sense rhat to get in some guy needs to take your name and license plate.
For many many businesses parks in my country that is still the defacto. There isn't really a camera watching that other than general CCTV that probably doesn't have the resolution to pick up text on our license plates. It's cheaper for them to literally pay a guy to stand at a boom and get that information than to install the technology required to track that automatically.
It depends of the local cost of labor, also the technology is easier to scale, imagine New York City having employees at the bridges writing all the entering license plates! And searching through those records how many times a certain plate entered the city on a given time frame. To me the problem with technology is that they’re used for lazy policing to just inflate the numbers of solved cases. There were cases of cops feeding hand-drawn suspects to face recognition software. Every case becomes a “throw something to the wall and see what sticks”.
Legitimately if an investigator put a hard drawn sketch through facial recognition and that was even remotely allowed into evidence by the court then the suspect evidence wasn't the issue