You are incorrect. "Quasi-public" is a distinction made in public/private discourse. The US supreme court has made many rulings specifically concerning quasi-public areas, most of which concern free speech.
I do find it intriguing that in this debate, I am defending privacy rights when my own research and passion are in preserving and reclaiming public spacing!
Although I generally pay less attention to American law now than Canadian jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court have vacillated on this topic depending on which court was deciding the opinions. During the Earl Warren court era, the court largely affirmed public activity within private spaces, as the presence of places like "company towns" and "shopping centers" both deemed private were not off-grounds for religious groups and unions to speak, respectively. These had become, per Justice Marshall, the "'functional equivalent' of a sidewalk in a public business district," and such activity was "so historically associated with the exercise of First Amendment rights"
Amalgamated Food Employees Union Local 590 vs. Logan Valley Plaza, Inc. (1968) (and
Marsh v. Alabama (1946) in re: company towns). In both, yes, the "'Marsh Doctrine' affirmed First Amendment rights over private property rights when an owner opened up his or her property for use by the public" [Cohen, Lizabeth, 1996, 1069]. Then during the Nixon years, the Court backtracked in
Lloyd Corporation v. Tanner (1972), ruling that public leafletting in a shopping mall "would be an unwarranted infringement of property rights 'without significantly enhancing the asserted right of free speech'" [ibid.]. The above was clarified in
PruneYard v. Robbins (1980), which allowed limited public expressions in private space, but the "First Amendement did not guarantee access to shopping malls" and referred jurisdiction to the state level [ibid, 1070]. While these cases share the common denominator in determining the presence of a public authority (the American constitution) in private spacing, none explicitly addressed it in "quasi-public" terminology.
It's also easy to make a mental jump between "quasi-public" and "public" given the root word, when the former literally means "pseudo-public", "not really public", or "superficially public" but in every instance,
not public. This is why the American court (to say nothing of the Supreme Court of Canada) have found it so difficult to effect a cut-and-dry ruling on private spacing that mimics the public. To intone that "quasi-public" is
like public is to chisel away at the meaning of public (and public spacing) and to operate as if
not-public places truly are public whether they
seem public, feel public, look public, or even act public. But whatever the case, they are private, not public, full-stop.
I am pointing out that what is allowed is up to the property owner. Within what is legal, the property owner must make exclusions. If not excluded, what is publicly legal is legal in the quasi public area, and even then the property owner may or may not be able to enforce their own wishes, depending on how "public" they have made their private property. I have dealt with this specific issue many times in my job. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a quasi public area. Zero.
(n.b., emphasis mine) I interpret "exclusions" to mean exclusions from an expressly private space under complete control of the property owner. This is why, say, an izakaya might expect a more subdued clientèle than, say, a sport pub, and why the sport pub proprietor makes an exclusion allowing the patrons to be loud and boisterous with no worry about being ejected for doing so. An izakaya owner, meanwhile, expects their private space to be respectfully adhered to and such loudness would not be permitted.
Personal privacy and
private spacing function as two different concepts. They do overlap, but they are not synonymous. The case I introduced into this conversation, that of the birthday lunch, confronts how these two concepts differ. In a public space, one has no reasonable expectation of privacy whatsoever. In a private space, one does have a right to articulate limits of personal privacy. In a most glaring example, an individual entering a washroom or change room at a private shopping mall has an articulated right to expect not to be photographed or videotaped by either the property owner or a random peeping-tom who gets his willies off from watching videos of, say, women's bathing suit areas. Variations on this articulated right apply as well to other private spaces, even when the circumstances are less extreme and as flagrantly violating. In both this and the restaurant example, the individual has a right to arrive to that space with the reasonable expectation that a camera operated by an unknown agent won't be shoved in their face or place them in a situation where having the image taken of them would compromise their personal privacy (or personal dignity). Seeking consent can eliminate this barrier: if the washroom was adorned with a sign saying, "You may be videotaped in our effort to curtail shoplifting" or if an itinerant camera guy waiting inside a private eatery to shoot pictures of people he doesn't know in the slightest informed those people in advance either verbally or in writing, with*perhaps a sign at the entrance explaining such then the person is informed enough to make a decision to not enter either space if they feel their personal privacy would be compromised. This, however, is not what the guy in question did, and it amounted to an ambush of people he didn't even know. This is why my friend apologized for his behaviour, even though she didn't need to. Had she known beforehand that he was coming with gear in tow for the purpose of shooting the party, she would have been able to say in her invite send-out that "a photographer friend of mine will be taking pictures!"
