NYPD bypassed facial recognition ban to ID pro-Palestinian student protester

This seems to be a mixed bag for privacy.

You have the judge coming down on the side of privacy, which is good; but the circumstances of the particular case are troubling (allegations of someone throwing a rock at someone else).

I'd be happier gaining ground for privacy rights with cases about, e.g., blanket surveillance, using surveillance for political purposes, surveillance capitalism, etc. Then we figure out where the best lines are for when surveillance actually should or can be used.

(Edit: And ill-considered downvotes is why I'm not going to bother to try to have a meaningful discussion on HN.)

Making a whole big "but" around something that probably happens on a playground everyday feels at best like bad faith here. Just maybe a low bar for "troubling," and is the perfect framing and mindset for allowing exceptions like this to continue to be pushed through.

The problem with that approach is that it will validate police illegal surveillance, and they'll only do more and more of it.

The ACLU doesn’t defend nazis for free speech because they think nazi opinions should be embraced by society, but because rights need to be defended for the most reprehensible for them to be truly universal. Same deal here

We either have rights to privacy from the police or we don't - if we lose the “rights” at police discretion we don't.

The system has tools like warrants for this. It appears to me as just sloppy policework.

“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas