alt Hacker News“Personal information” has a legal definition and photos of you in a public street might not satisfy it, regardless of the photographer’s intent.
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Personal information usually does include photos of someone in public without their consent: exceptions usually hold for taking photos of people where it is in the public interest to be able to show them or impractical to get consent. This covers large gatherings and celebrities, but a portrait photo of a stranger might put you on the wrong side of the law.
Obviously, the idea is to not disallow having someone take a photo of you as a background, passing figure as they take a front-and-center photo of their family, but not allow you to be the main subject unknowingly and especially when you object explicitly.
On the other hand, a photographer still owns the copyright to a photo, so a subject (including in a portrait) cannot claim it or distribute it without permission even if they can potentially stop the photographer from distributing that photo.
IANAL, but you are not by default allowed to use anyone's "likeness" for your individual profit.
I think it'd be challenging to rule that a license plate number is not personally identifiable information, when the same regulations often state that an IP address is.
Indeed, that definition is included in the CCPA.
> (v) (1) “Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household. Personal information includes, but is not limited to, the following [...]:
> (E) Biometric information.
> (H) Audio, electronic, visual, thermal, olfactory, or similar information.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
To your point, the intent would presumably still matter for exceptions to when deletion requests must be honored (say for journalism), but a photo of someone walking down a public street would still logically be considered the subject's personal information, by the above definition.
Well, it matters if the photographer is the government (or contracted by the government, or subpoenaed by the government): see Chatrie v. United States [0]. The Fourth Amendment exists, and it remains to be tested whether querying massive surveillance networks is a "reasonable" search.
[0]: https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/chatrie-v-united...