Here are some civil-liberty questions worth debating: assuming you’re an ordinary everyday person going about your life without harming others —an assumption which holds true for the overwhelming majority of people— do you have any privacy rights when you’re outside your own home?

Do police have the right to track you, and keep a permanent record of your whereabouts at all times?

If the cops have this right, should anybody else? These are not hypothetical questions in today’s interconnected Internet era, with recording technology so cheap and ubiquitous, anybody with a smartphone has the ability to take pictures or video footage, then almost instantly post it online or add it to a distant database.

That, of course, is in addition to the security cameras, traffic cams, police dashboard cameras, and other publicly and privately owned surveillance tools in today’s society.

Unsurprisingly, government and law enforcement officials have been quick to embrace such surveillance technologies, especially license plate recognition (LPR) scanners that photograph the license plate of any passing vehicle, then instantly compare it to the plates recorded on one of several databases.