From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us).
I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment.
Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government against the people does not seem to align with my understanding of why the Bill of Rights was cemented into our constitution in the first place.
I wonder what Adams or Madison would make of it. I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.
I wonder if they'd consider every license plate reading a violation of the 4th amendment.
> because there is no expectation of privacy in public
I think maybe the worst part is that the more we buy into this belief the more self fulfilling it becomes (see third link). But I don't expect anyone to believe me so here's several links. And I'd encourage people to push back against this misnomer. In the most obvious of cases I hope we all expect to have privacy in a public restroom. But remember that this extends beyond that. And remember that privacy is not binary. It's not a thing you have complete privacy or none (public restrooms again being an obvious example). So that level of privacy that we expect is ultimately decided by us. By acting as if it is binary only enables those who wish to take those rights from us. They want you to be nihilistic
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/you-really-do-have-som...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_expectation_of_priv...
https://legalclarity.org/is-there-an-expectation-of-privacy-...