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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @08:32PM
Usually you will have a used car dealer insert in place of the license plate, and you are expected to have a red square temporary (also used while waiting for new registration tags or to operate your vehicle temporarily in order to get it smogged/repaired.) The reason for this is that used car dealerships are supposed to give up a car's original license plates when plated in the dealer's yard. It is supposed to help avoid issues with people stealing cars from used car lots and running around in them with old owner info still tied to the plates. Honestly I don't understand how any of that is an issue in the digital age, but that is the basics of the why.
The how is that people use it as a way to avoid speeding tickets and identification, along with illegal tints, in order to avoid tying the car, and their illegal operations while in control of it to irrefutable proof it is theirs.
Since the paper temporaries are almost impossible to read inside the rear window (even untinted!) the only way to verify registration is to pull the owner over, which happens on occasion, but most cops don't want the hassle unless they catch them driving erratically, or they're low on quota for the month.