American Airlines Has Cameras in Their Screens Too

IANAL.

In the USA, it depends on jurisdiction and the circumstances. For example, CA is a "two-party consent" state, meaning that to record another party requires their knowledge and consent in some circumstances. This case (a camera in the back of an airline seat) is a bit on the line: the space isn't terribly private (it's a row of seats on an airline), yet a private conversation might be had in a low voice between two people, who did not see, or do not recognize, and were not told that there is a camera pointed right at them.

I do not know if this is a violation of two-party consent. It might not be.

It's interesting how the expectation of privacy varies from person to person!

Since members of the general public are in close proximity I generally wouldn't consider an airplane cabin a place where I could have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

In places that are intentionally restricted from view by others, like my own home, a hotel room, etc. I'd have an expectation of privacy.

>I'm not even arguing legally, even just in terms of common sense, everything you do or say is isn't private in those circumstances. So a camera being there (regardless of if it is used) isn't moving the needle either direction.

You already have a number of replies covering some good ground, but there is a word covering the feeling I don't see yet: stalking. There is a fundamental difference in feeling (and a legally recognized one as well) between being seen/heard a specific coincidental instances by a crowd of random strangers whom one might quite reasonably expect to never encounter again in their entire lives -versus- having a single person individual or organization conduct persistent surveillance of you. This isn't some weird obscure situation either is it? The uncomfortableness level seems to be pretty universal. The other unrelated passengers on the airplane are generally going to be an entirely random and diverse group of total strangers. They're unlikely to remember you, to care, or to have any particular interest in you, let alone the ability and volume of information necessary to affect you.

But the airliner is a singular entity, and in this instance it's actually fairly illuminating to apply the "personhood" idea to it and consider it as if a single powerful person was following you and recording you constantly. That person does have a direct economic interest in you, may wield a certain level of monopoly power depending on location, or alternately can easily potentially collaborate with a small number of other "persons" with your information. The person will not forget and can follow you over decades. They can do the same to friends, relatives and acquaintances, drawing inferences and information from higher level social network graphs that would not be discernible from a small given slice.

Now you might not care about this yourself, but you should still be able to recognize that it's something quite different then merely "being in public amongst instantiated strangers". Historically it has been perfectly reasonable from an information theory point of view to have a certain expectation of common likely "anonymity in a crowd", because it's not physically possible for a single human to remember tens of thousands of people. Historically when attempts have been made to use some minimal level of technology and large numbers of bodies to implement mass surveillance and centralized recording an analysis it has made people quite uncomfortable (the Stasi say). There is no reason why advancing technology making it cheaper and requiring less bodies would make people suddenly be fine with it would it?

Scale sometimes brings emergent effects that are a pure function of large numbers. You can't always do a clean extrapolation.

Indeed, I am far more discomforted by the "Google snuck a microphone into products it sold consumers and placed in their homes" than "very visible cameras exist in airplanes which are already operating between the most heavily camera-covered facilities on the planet".

And AA can fix this with stickers. Occasionally a kid will peel one off, but nobody will really care.

I give it about a week until the airlines cover all the cameras with stickers. Maybe a nice little company logo.