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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 NotSanguine on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:37PM
It should not be impossible to identify an individual, because that's the only way to provide consequences for their actions.
You make my point for me. I said:
The technology is in place. You can't stop folks from watching/tracking you. Which means that when you do stuff in public, others can and will see it. As such, you already don't have privacy in public spaces. The privacy in public spaces ship has sailed, and I don't think it's coming back into port anytime soon.
What we can do (or at least try to do) is to create a framework where law enforcement and other government entities are forbidden from identifying you unless there's a public safety issue. That's (relative) anonymity.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr