Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

this isn't facial recognition

???

Who's talking about that?

why would it be illegal?

Generally, you cannot just record people without their consent; but this also largely depends on the jurisdiction/situation.

Almost nowhere (or actually nowhere?) are you allowed to set up a surveillance device into a space that is not public and it is not owned by you.

Public university labs are generally public as they're state property (in this particular case, UW Madison is a public state University). Further, recording video or pictures of people in public places is broadly legal in the US. There are only "presumption of privacy" restrictions which apply to places such as bathrooms and private property that is not visible from a public location (ex. a sidewalk).

Obv. IANAL and this is not legal advice.

>Public university labs are generally public as they're state property

Wrong. They're state property, you even wrote it there.

>Obv. IANAL

Obv.

what do you think public mean, they have to belong to Mr. P. Ublic?

By this logic the dorm room bathrooms at public universities are also public and I should be able to setup cameras /s

This reasoning makes sense. Roads and parks aren’t public, as they are city property. “Public” is only when something has no legal owner, like the moon and stars, or love.

Generally, in the United States, you can, in fact, just record people. Legally speaking, that is, which doesn't make it a polite or cool thing to do. Necessarily.

If you're on someone else's property, they can of course set any number of rules, and trespass those who break those rules. But even there, recording people, if against the rules, is still not a crime. The crime is trespass, if this journalist we're speaking of sticks around after being trespassed off the property.

just for the sake of conversation…

if you did, where would you have set them up at anyway? Asking for a friend

Good one, champ!

Meanwhile in reality: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x....

And thus they'd fall under the legal definition of public: "Under the authority of the government or belonging and available to the people."

or

"of or relating to a government"