Comment Re:Take pictures, press charges. (Score 1) 921
I fully agree that the implications must be thought through, but I think you're setting up false dichotomies with your examples.
For example, it's perfectly possible to continue allowing things like reporters covering a story or taking selfies without violating anyone's privacy and giving Google or Facebook a running history of where everyone has been whether they like it or not. One simple solution would be adapting technology that mostly already exists anyway to slightly exaggerate the blurring of any recognisable figures in the background of the shot, who are probably somewhat out of focus anyway, enough to prevent facial recognition. Combine that with a social understanding that it's rude to go around uploading photos to the Internet, particularly with time/place metadata attached, unless you've hit the soften button first. Even if some people deliberately ignored that social convention for a while, if most people favoured it then it would still fix much of the involuntary tracking problem.
I tend to think that most security cameras are little more than security theatre anyway, so I'm not too bothered by the general idea of regulating their use. In any case, it needn't be a black and white ban. If the goal is to preserve the general principle of privacy, by maintaining approximately the traditional level of obscurity/anonymity, it would suffice to ensure that security cameras operated by the owners of premises or the local police were on closed circuits and the footage from them wasn't uploaded or processed other than in response to an actual security problem, in which case specific footage would be accessed and normal data protection rules could apply.