If I'm a pedestrian getting my body filmed, 3D-scanned, with potential facial recognition and internal-organs-penetrating sensors added on top, _I'm_ the one who should own that data (and the right to not consent to its collection in the first place). Why are people weirded out by some Google Glass-wearing rando filming them on the sidewalk but ok for everyone behind a wheel to be suddenly promoted to a CCTV omnisensing recorder?
>Why are people weirded out by some Google Glass-wearing rando filming them on the sidewalk but ok for everyone behind a wheel to be suddenly promoted to a CCTV omnisensing recorder?
Pedestrians are promoting dense and walk-able cities, environmentally sustainable transportation, healthy lifestyles and are generally virtuous. Drivers are wasting space, killing the planet, promoting a sedentary lifestyle and are generally evil.
Yes I'm being a bit absurd and over the top here but the point is that most people aren't disciplined enough to stick to their principals when a group they don't like is the one getting screwed.
most people aren't disciplined enough to stick to their principals when a group they don't like is the one getting screwed
For most people, it's hard to keep out of group-think mode 100% of the time. It's especially hard to do when emotions are involved. As a consequence, most are only too happy to screw the members of the groups they don't like.
This is why one should stay away from politics where one is labeling another group as inferior or bad, based on how they were born, or based on what they believe. It's better to convince than to condemn.
I think it is even simpler than this in that most people don't realize they are being tracked in this way. It is easy to seem hypocritical when you are simply ignorant of a potentially parallel case.
You will absolutely get into some kind of trouble (social or legal) if you put a camera on a sidewalk and start filming whoever goes by. On the other hand CCTV cameras don't receive any flak. Society is usually not obviously consistent about privacy matters. The ultimate determining factor is what seems creepy vs what is necessary. So its entirely possible that some societies might decide that the video taping done by self-driving cars is sufficiently creepy to ban.
No you won't, I've had a camera mounted on my house for years with no issues, I did this when my car got hit by a neighbor and I had to chase down camera footage from a CCTV camera operated by a home builder down the street, having that footage was the only way they were held responsible for it, as after initially admitting to it they later decided they didn't want to pay. Many people also run dashcams for insurance purposes, perfectly legal.
Personally I find devices that record locally or to user-owned services perfectly fine, keeping local recordings on your dashcam's SD card, awesome, keeping your home recordings on your NVR, NAS or private server, that's okay, but sending that to corporate or government owned services is generally bad. There's a limit to how much an individual can do with the data they record from a few places they own, their car, their house, etc. There's no limit to how much abuse a large entity can do with that data, facial recognition and more computing power than they know what to do with.
Drawing this line legally however is... extremely challenging.
The reality is what we have here is a tradeoff between freedom and security with any individual CCTV camera. Those are both valuable things in their own right and such tradeoffs should be made carefully.
When we then hand that data off to a corporation or government entity, that tradeoff looks very different - now they have access to thousands if not millions of sensors. The freedom implications become much higher and the security is often replaced with things like "how good is our traffic data?", "how can we improve our self-driving system to sell more cars?" or "how can the Chinese government bust more Muslims?". The aggregated result is rarely worth it.
This is a bad attempt to ridicule the issue. Obviously we're talking about data here that is processable by third parties. Nobody but you can get (reliable) data out of your brain, but pictures of you or information about you kept on recording can be used by third parties for everything ranging from policing to advertisement or anything else.
In Germany for example Google Streetview is mostly not available, because a significant percentage of people considered it unacceptable and have the right to opt out of it, and the company has to blur faces, houses, addresses and so on.
It's not processable by third parties? If you tweet that you met me at a conference and then someone else tweets that you saw me at the airport, etc. now people can't use that to infer my location and travel patterns? You're just drawing the line conveniently where you can violate my privacy while simultaneously claiming the higher ground.
I hope your friends treat you with the fear that they should considering you seem to believe that their private information is not "processable by third parties" and therefore probably treat it with no discretion whatsoever.
