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from the big-brother's-private-sector-sibling? dept.
If the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a San Diego-based Republican state senator have their way, it will soon become legal for Californians to cover their license plates while parked as a way to thwart automated license plate readers.
Those devices, now commonly in use by law enforcement nationwide, can capture license plate numbers at a very high rate of speed, as well as record the GPS location, date, and time that a particular plate is seen. Those plates are then run against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted cars, and a cop is then alerted to the presence of any vehicle with a match on that list.
As written, the new senate bill would allow for law enforcement to manually lift a cover, or flap, as a way to manually inspect a plate number. The idea is not only to prevent dragnet license plate data collection by law enforcement, but also by private companies. A California company, Vigilant Solutions, is believed to have the largest private ALPR database in America, with billions of records.
Do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public?
(Score: 4, Informative) by kaszz on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:08AM (2 children)
The problem is while they can wash it. The practicality of it is however dismal. The scanners are used by driving by, so as to read many plates fast. It's data gathering where the opportunity makes the surveillance.
(Score: 2) by rcamera on Tuesday May 09 2017, @03:27PM (1 child)
during the latest NYC snowstorm, the MTA cancelled all trains for the remainder of the day. this left me "abandoned" in the city, which is very sucky. what's even suckier is that i only paid $8 for parking, which entitled me to only 1 day of parking, expiring at midnight that evening.
the snow stopped early (~15:00, as expected), but trains were still canceled, so there was still no way out. i rented an overpriced room near the office, with the hopes that i would get reimbursed by the company. at ~00:05, the friendly local police farce where my car was parked SHOVELED A PATH TO MY CAR THROUGH THE PLOW-DRIFT AND CLEANED THE LICENSE (and a tiny bit of the windshield - just enough to put my wiper blade down so it could hold the shiny new $40 ticket; of course, the wiper blade then froze onto the window, as expected.)
they CAN and WILL clean it if it helps with their quota.
/* no comment */
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:22PM
Yeah they were dicks.
But that doesn't change the point, the only reason they put in that effort was because they were confident of a nearly 100% hit-rate.
When the hit-rate is less than 1% that level of effort isn't worth it.