alt Hacker NewsIf I see something weird going on outside my house, should I be allowed to take a picture of it?
If I decide to take a picture of what's going on outside my house for no reason at all, should that also be allowed?
if I decide to put a camera in my living room pointed out the window and record, should that be allowed?
If I decide to run a business out of my home, does that change anything?
Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.
Some things that are not much of a problem at a small scale ("take a picture of a specific strange thing you see happening", "record one license plate of a specific car in relation to an incident") can become a problem at scale ("set up a video camera to constantly surveil the sidewalk and do facial recognition on it", "record every license plate that goes by and correlate your recordings with a million other people to generate a tracking map").
The problem is with pervasive surveillance, not discrete observation, and that's the spirit that laws about surveillance should attempt to uphold.