Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday May 09 2017, @08:12AM   Printer-friendly
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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:39AM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:39AM (#506809) Homepage Journal

    Do we have a right to privacy in public? Yes, actually, we do.

    Imagine an organization that runs security cameras for many different companies. The cameras are all in public locations, or in businesses open to the public. They decide to run the videos they capture through facial recognition software, put together a profile of each individual's activities, and sell that information. Can they? It's all public information, after all.

    Maybe it's harmless for some people. Others might prefer that their visit to the sex-toy shop not be general knowledge. The information could also be used for criminal purposes, like discovering which bank a business uses for after-hours deposits.

    Individual bits of public information are mostly harmless, but there is an argument for restricting it, precisely to prevent lots of those bits from being assembled into a larger profile. In TFA: mass documentation of which car is where - by officials or by private companies - sounds like exactly the sort of thing we want to prevent.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PusaAtDaga on Tuesday May 09 2017, @11:00AM

    by PusaAtDaga (6578) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @11:00AM (#506828)

    Agreed. I am not opposed to the police scanning plates to compare to a list of wanted vehicles. I do oppose retaining the scan of a vehicle without a warrant. The limited technology of the past prevented mass surveillance since it would require manpower. Now that they can automate surveillance we need to update the rules of what the government can do in public.