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The issue is still that you're likening surveillance to harassment more than you're likening it to an intrusion of privacy. Based on this argument alone, I'm less inclined to agree with your position, because surveillance isn't harassment.

You're still using definitions of privacy violation, surveillance, and harassment with which I do not agree. The distinctions between the three don't have to be drawn where you seem to be drawing them, and both the example I gave and invisible surveillance should qualify as all three.

By the way, would you still call it harassment if you never got in the way of the person you were following, never acknowledged your presence, and generally let them go about their business while you were busily recording everything they did? Most people would still be very unhappy.

You realize you're not saying anything more than, "I think it's wrong, so I'm going to go searching for a rationalization," right?

That's not the case at all. I've raised arguments that appeal to technical people in the past, and users like rayiner jump in with a claim that "common people" just don't care about technical stuff. Now I'm using arguments that appeal to the aforementioned "common people," and you're jumping in to say they aren't technical enough :-).

Moreover, I was responding to your specific claim that "it's unreasonable to expect that you will remain unseen when walking through a public park."

I'm not interested in doing that hard philosophical work ... but I don't think it's impossible to come up with a reasonably sound proof.

I don't expect to conclude the privacy and surveillance debate once and for all in this thread. No doubt Bruce Schneier, the EFF, and others are way ahead of us on formalizing the best arguments.




> By the way, would you still call it harassment if you never got in the way of the person you were following, never acknowledged your presence, and generally let them go about their business while you were busily recording everything they did? Most people would still be very unhappy.

... they certainly are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz8PdALdQDI


> By the way, would you still call it harassment if you never got in the way of the person you were following, never acknowledged your presence, and generally let them go about their business while you were busily recording everything they did? Most people would still be very unhappy.

Google "paparazzi". Notice the distinctions between a legal claim of privacy intrusion and the legal claim of harassment. And also, notice the legal claim of freedom of the press.

Your model of "people with cameras following you around" might sound really novel and clever to you, but we've had such people for a long time. And guess what? In public, no one considers it a privacy intrusion. It's harassment.

> Now I'm using arguments that appeal to the aforementioned "common people," and you're jumping in to say they aren't technical enough

Technical arguments are not philosophical arguments. Believe it or not, programmers do not have a monopoly on The Right Way To Do Everything. A philosophical argument can depend too much on jargon and be perverted by political spin, this is true. But you can still methodically break it down and explain it to a non-technical person if you've put it together well.

Watch http://justiceharvard.org sometime.

Failing to convince someone is your fault, not theirs.


Fine, if you prefer, let's label ubiquitous surveillance as harassment. And the NSA are not the press.


Wow. You have no capacity to listen to what I'm saying at all, do you?




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