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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: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:50PM (1 child)
and the police will target enforcement at "problem" areas, creating a bias that keeps statistically criminal populations
Not to mention it would be pretty easy to *create* statistically criminal areas based on, say, ethnicity by patrolling there and arresting everybody who jaywalks or litters or whatever you can pin on them.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:54PM
It can be correlated with other data to find the correct prevalence.