Wow. There you go again! So if my thinking involves someone else’s information, they have some right to make me change my thinking or punish me if I don’t??
First, you switched from respecting peoples' privacy to taking notes, thinking, and having opinions. I even responded to your comment before you added the notebook in the park example. You probably also noticed that I put »thinking« in quotes.
Anyway, it is not the act of having the information about other people that is problematic, it is the act of collecting, using, or sharing it. Do you think I should be able to follow you around and write down every step you make? Should I be able to use that information in every way I want? Do you want me to tell your significant other what you actually did on that »business« trip, tell your coworkers what you got from the sex shop? Should your doctor be able to tell everyone about your health status, your bank about your financial status?
It is just naive to pretend that handling information is inherently without any concerns and therefore no rules should apply at all. And it is just silly to pretend that writing down an observation you made in the park in a notebook is the same and should be treated in the same way as systematically collecting information about every website visitor.
I didn’t write the original comment about the notebook in the park, just FYI.
And your examples are not all the same. If you’re in public, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. So yeah, take all the notes about me you want. That’s entirely different from my doctor sharing my health info.
Sorry, my fault with that first comment. Then why is your doctor not allowed to share your health information but a website where you search for and read about medical conditions can collect and share what you looked up as they please?
And while you personally may not have any expectations of privacy in the public, that is certainly not true in general for everyone and in every country. Here in Germany the constitutional court ruled just this week that having a dash cam in a car violates the privacy rights of the people you capture.
You are also generally not allowed to take photos of people in the public without their consent. It is not a problem if they randomly appear in a picture you took of a building or whatever, but you are not allowed to take photos were people are the main motive.
