Bop Spotter

Love this idea! I presume you're using cellular? Won't it rack up a lot of costs?

[flagged]

I did some measurements on shazam and it seems to send about 7kb/minute, which corresponds to 300MB/month, i.e. no big deal. I suppose it helps that shazam was designed in the age of expensive bandwidth.

NAL but in most jurisdictions anything that happens in public is freely recordable.

The illegal part here is likely the attachment of a device to public property without permission from local authorities.

However, the same service would likely be legal if a few people were hired to walk around with microphones. Or potentially if the microphones were attached to vehicles.

Edit - also might be legal if OP purchased / leased some property facing the street.

Who exactly is being surveiled here? How is their privacy being affected by this?

This device is not surveilling anyone as far as I can tell. It's logging music that's being played in public in its vicinity. It's not tracking individuals, it's not recording faces.

When someone does something in public, they sort of lose the claim/right to privacy, because they are doing it /in public/. If they wanted privacy they should have done their thing in private.

If you are not willing to grant consent to this thing listening to you, then maybe you should not walk around in public playing your music loudly. Or should everyone who is within earshot of you first get your consent, else they must stick their fingers in their ears?