If that camera system is closed-circuit and its data is restricted to the premises they should be permitted to do that.
If the data from that camera system [0] can be removed from the premises by anything less than a search warrant or court order, then no, they should not be permitted to do that.
I know this isn't how the relevant laws work now, but they haven't been adequately updated to account for radical changes in the ability for companies to perform mass surveillance.
[0] ...whether raw or "processed" by -say- a "customer analytics" software... [1]
[1] Want a count of the day's customers? Check register receipts. Want to know what displays are most popular? Ask your employees, or employ someone to take notes. etc, etc, etc.
Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.
Some things that are not much of a problem at a small scale ("take a picture of a specific strange thing you see happening", "record one license plate of a specific car in relation to an incident") can become a problem at scale ("set up a video camera to constantly surveil the sidewalk and do facial recognition on it", "record every license plate that goes by and correlate your recordings with a million other people to generate a tracking map").
The problem is with pervasive surveillance, not discrete observation, and that's the spirit that laws about surveillance should attempt to uphold.
> Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.
That doesn't seem accurate. Do you have an example of a law that prohibits filming on public property? Isn't the legality the whole premise of what those weirdo "first amendment auditors" on YouTube do?
Depends on your local law, but in many, many places you cannot legally record a conversation you aren't a party to, even in public. In the US, in many states, it's not permitted to record a conversation you are a party to if others have not consented. There are various reasonable exceptions that permit recordings (e.g. public events, press conferences, trials, governmental meetings, recording interactions with police). "Conversation between two people happening in public" is not typically a permitted exception for recording.
Note that in this comment I'm talking about audio recording, which typically has much stricter regulations than video recording. I think the same principles should apply to video, and in some jurisdictions they do. But in my comment, I was using the laws around audio recordings vs physical eavesdropping to make an analogy about the problem of pervasive surveillance.
Many jurisdictions already have laws about where you can point cameras "in your own place", including when they point out of your place. For instance, you are already not allowed to point a camera out your window at someone else's home, or into their backyard. You also can't legally record audio in most places. We should have more such restrictions on surveillance as the pervasive use of surveillance has become more of a threat.
It wasn't bait posting at all. It was a question for critical thinking. The rude was started with the response to that question. If you think you can tell me what I can do in my own place, you'll get a rude response as well. Where do you get off telling me what I can/cannot do in my private place?
Reminds me of the "Surveillance Camera Man" project[1] from a while back, where a guy went around silently filming people in public. People didn't like it and some responded aggressively, even though those same people probably thought nothing of the numerous actual surveillance cameras pointing at them all the time.
There's a whole category of video content called "First Amendment Audits" where people film with big cameras in public and farm people random, and often quite hostile, reactions.
