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, @03:28PM (1 child)
Gotta join in the angry mob flaming you about "rate of speed" vs. "change in speed." Human languages for the most part are not languages of logic or precision. They're fuzzy things chock full of idioms and figures of speech, abound with ambiguity. They're not even self-consistent. You can't take a first year language class without coming across at least one irregular verb in the first couple of weeks. Academics attempt to publish "RFCs" like The Elements of Style [wikipedia.org] but the unwashed masses with their common usage will always win. Even then, there's the infamous Oxford comma. Get over it.
If you want a thought that will really drive you nuts, I wouldn't be surprised if the greengrocers' apostrophe becomes a grammatically correct way of forming a plural in English given enough time.
That being said, have you given Lojban [wikipedia.org] a try? You might like it.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:33PM
What advantage does Lojban have over Esperanto?