Worthwhile to point out that this applies predominantly to the US. In many countries, public pictures can only be taken with the individuals' consent, Germany for example and many other European countries have a 'right to your own image/likeness' or a concept along similar lines.
That said the difference between law enforcement collecting your data and private citizens should also be obvious.
If you purposely ignore the power of new tech. Might as well say nothing changed with the invention of earth moving machinery because you could have done the same thing with a shovel.
I don't think he's missing the point so much as you're missing his, possibly intentionally.
The point is that the degree to which something is possible at scale has an impact on the practical applications of that thing, and therefore on the people subject to its application. Viz., earth moving machinery (and related engineering) has made possible things that would previously have required orders of magnitude more time and/or manpower, likely making them economically infeasible except in rare cases where money was no object.
He didn't say anything about property rights. That was you... for some reason.
Our existing laws and ideas of privacy were build based on the limitations of the current tech. Yes you could take a photo of a random person in public but it wasn't very useful or harmful to do so. Now we have supercharged spyware tech we have the ability to cause a lot of harm without being in violation of any existing laws because such a thing simply wasn't possible previously.
We actually had anonymity of the crowds back then, which facial recog tech circumvents.
The problem is also that there are a LOT of laws, and it's very easy to manufacture a crime.
I would also suggest reading about people who have been subject to unwarranted surveillance just because of their views, and the damage it does them. A good example is the environmental groups in the 90s in the UK.
Saying technological changes don't subvert the underlying structure of a concept is like saying war didn't change after the introduction of gunpowder or flight.
These technological changes add additional dimensions, they may not radically change the initial structure but they lead to radically different outcomes than anticipated which society doesn't have to accept.
The camera was invented and this became a problem for public figures. It became more of a problem with digital photography. Much more of a problem with camera phones. And became the privacy nightmare we are now dealing with around the rise of Twitter and Instagram.
