> You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.

Similar to "free speech", it is not as simple as that. Harassment and stalking among other things. I dare you to try hanging around a school with a DSLR taking pictures of kids in the playground and defend yourself with "But I'm in public!"

Without going into the list of misdemeanors, generally the point is intent.

If you take a picture, or ten, ostensibly of Times Square, no one cares. You can't piece together a person's day.

The application of computing@scale (processing, storage, pattern recognition) changes the outcomes significantly. The hard to piece together day of the everyperson suddenly becomes a trivial query away.

Whether that should be legal or not is quite rightly up for debate.

The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation.

Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.

> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.

This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.

> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public.

Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.

"Anyone can record you at any time in public" is vastly different from "a single entity is recording you over time and locations across the country/state/city"