> 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.