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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?


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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday May 09 2017, @08:39PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @08:39PM (#507109) Homepage

    Probably Ricer motherfuckers who don't have the front plate on, because its edgy or something. Then when they get pulled over they pull the plate out and put it on their dashboard while giggling sheepishly.