It's not exactly unusual that people consider too-detailed and/or large scale attention paid to technically public things "spying" or similar to it. E.g. if the government were to have agents follow members of a group anywhere and watching their homes, without breaking into private spaces, that'd probably be labeled as such too. Even though they are just collecting publicly visible information and report "Mr Smith is getting close to the court house. Mrs Smith spoke to the lawyer again." Social media just makes automating that a lot easier.
> Even though they are just collecting publicly visible information and report "Mr Smith is getting close to the court house. Mrs Smith spoke to the lawyer again.
If this observation was made done from a public area or from a publicly visible vantage point, how would you're describing be any different from news coverage?
Basically every way? If the government was tracking everywhere you went via cameras, people would also call that spying. Are you arguing that when a spy follows someone in public and watches everything they do, that isn't spying?
While they don't track other people everywhere at once, the media does record what people say or do and you as an individual have little control concerning what's published about you and how and to what degree other will react. But this form of recording isn't generally called spying, even if the circumstances are disadvantageous or even dangerous to the subject being recorded. When it comes to the media, the general understanding is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public area. I don't see why it would be different for government. In addition, the government needn't set up these cameras when it can simply request footage from third parties such as Nest and/or its end-users. The person "violating" your expectation to privacy in a public setting is your fellow private citizen whether for occupational or security-related reasons. The same is true for public posts on the Internet. There is nothing that forbids the government from copy and compiling information that's publicly available to all.
Context and scale matter. Drawing a picture of a dollar bill is not illegal, but forgery is. It's not illegal to call someone, or to ask them a question, or to follow someone. It IS illegal to stalk someone.
Who determines context in this case? On what basis?
I disagree that scale matters. A right doesn't disappear simply because multiple people exercise it in a way others find unpleasant. Either a liberty exists on its own merits to it doesn't.
> Drawing a picture of a dollar bill is not illegal, but forgery is
Forgery requires a mens rea; in particular there must be an intent to deceive or profit from deceit.
> It's not illegal to call someone, or to ask them a question, or to follow someone. It IS illegal to stalk someone.
In a number of cases, stalking statues have and do implicate rights. There isn't a consistent corpus of case law or statute to make a clear distinction between merely undesirable contact and stalking as such.
> Who determines context in this case? On what basis?
In general, you'll be sorely disappointed if you expect law to justify itself rigorously. That's not the point. The reason we use phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" is because that phrase should be interpreted personally by each juror. It is intentionally divorced from an objective standard.
> There isn't a consistent corpus of case law or statute to make a clear distinction between merely undesirable contact and stalking as such.
That's really not relevant to what I'm saying. Whether it's legal or not isn't really even relevant since I'm just trying to show you something that you think should obviously be illegal.
There are many other examples where scale changes the nature of the action. Sending a GET request is fine. DDOS is not. Sharing someone's address is fine. Putting their personal information everywhere is not. Doing something once may have much less or much more than 1% of the harm of doing it 100 times.
