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?

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.

Point out what [constitutionally valid] law it’s broken; if it’s audible to the ear from a public location in San Francisco (or anywhere in the US) then you’re allowed to record it (similarly if you can see it from a public vantage point, then you can photograph it).

If you weren’t it would be legally impossible for any two people to leave two voice messages simultaneously while in earshot of each other. You also couldn’t use Spotify in public ever.

You can certainly get in trouble for the uses you put that recording to, but as the OP isn’t selling or rebroadcasting and would have a solid fair use defense for any incidental copyright infringement, I don’t see any colorable claim that anyone this thing can hear has any reasonable expectation of privacy from it.

BTW, it’s making a very good point about actual surveillance equipment that is quite possibly installed all around you.

> Go get consent, sweaty.

The best way to get consent.

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