Yes I was aware of the pictures being available on your Flickr account, so my question was asked in order to indicate any potential inconsistencies in this situation.
Plenty of questions in your post.
So are you saying that it was illegal for you to take these pictures?
Taking pictures is legal. Publishing them may not be.
Or is or legal as long as nobody objects?
That is a strange question. It works in the opposite way: anyone can sue you or me for anything. The tribunal shall then decide who wins, based on what the law says. The law is not clear cut, this is why we need a tribunal.
Would they not first ask you to remove the pictures before suing?
Probably, yes.
In which case you would certainly oblige, wouldn't you?
I would.
Isn't it ironic that on the one hand we have a zillion security cameras and phone cams and what have you recording our every move and the privacy is non existent and on the other, people still stick to the illusion of having a right to privacy?
I think it works in the opposite way. People have a right to privacy. The fact that it is trampled by Facebook, Google and the NSA is likely to motivate some of them to defend it more strongly. And only a few won court actions with damages awarded will be enough to change the landscape considerably. This actually happened in France about 20 years ago: because of strict privacy laws and jurisprudence unfavorable to the photographers, finding your face published without your agreement became the equivalent of winning the lottery. People sued the photographers and won. Street photography became impossible.
At present, most photographers count on the fact that the people pictured in street portraits will not find out about the picture. It could very well be that, with advances in computer face recognition, the system becomes out of hand. I can already tell you the day that flickr introduces computer face recognition on their system, this thread will show lots of orphaned links.