SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:38PM (2 children)
I already ran into this problem with an unregistered car parked on Ca private property. The cops said if a car is visible from the street it has to have current registration, otherwise it has to be hidden from view from the street.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday May 09 2017, @03:23PM (1 child)
In my jurisdiction using a car cover in an acceptable way of hiding an unregistered vehicle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:15PM
Again in Ca, it has to be behind a solid fence or in a garage. Car covers have to have the license plate number printed on them if seen from the street.