The Feds are building an America-wide face surveillance system and ACLU is suing

I can't be the only one who gets depressed reading the news on here.

Everyday it's another article about your private information being sucked up and sold for advertising or hacked and sold to be used for stealing your identity or other nefarious shit.

Then there's the public side of gov't agencies monitoring everything in your life. At any point they can send an email to any tech company and get a full dump of your information. They're tracking everything you do online, they have cameras on every intersection recording your face.

Every cop car and repo truck is driving around collecting your license plate information tracking all your 'off-line' movements.

You can't walk around your neighborhood without your face being recorded by every paranoid household with a doorbell camera and feeding the government databases of your whereabouts.

You book a vacation and the next day every device you use connected to the internet is sending you ads about your vacation destination even though all you did was book a flight and get an email confirmation.

This sounds like some conspiracy tinfoil hat old man rant (I swear I'm non of those), but I hear regular "non-tech" people airing the same complaints more and more. It's just disappointing that there isn't an option to not participate I guess. Sorry for the long (mostly off topic) rant

In 2012, in a concurring opinion on a case involving warrantless GPS tracking, justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote:

"More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."

Just wondering when we're actually going to reconsider that premise and its legal cognates.

I hate getting political, but this is one of Andrew Yang's platform staples and is immediately relevant to your question. Look up his ideas about Data as a Right.

I recall a story about street performers in London demanding -- and getting -- copies of the videos of them doing their thing which were captured by CCTV. Just because something is performed in public doesn't make it legal to record it, and unless you sign a contract to the contrary, in the US you retain copyright to all original performances.

So... if you posit that your life is an act of performance art can you sue the intelligence agencies for violation of copyright by making and storing recordings of your original artwork (especially if you have the habit of working on your Silly Walk and speaking in impressionistic voices throughout your day)?

There is precedent in the US that this could be fair use.

> After considering the four factors in the aggregate, the court finds that the fair use doctrine does apply to the City of Radford Police Department's use of Shell's photographs and other works. As long as the use remains solely for the dual purposes of permitting City of Radford law enforcement officers to properly investigate allegedly criminal acts and to use that evidence in any subsequent criminal proceedings, it will be a fair use and not a violation of the Copyright Act.

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2407651/shell-v-city-o...