This is nothing compared to what cops are putting together, gathering data from all their tag reader cameras including ones monitoring popular roads and ones attached to police cars. And aggregating it at regional "fusion centers".
I'd love to know the justification the city of San Leandro use to explain why they're keeping photographic records of cars, owners, and their families - and just how uptight the police/city-officials would be if I took photos of them and their families in their driveways at the rate of "1000s every eight hours"…
Devil's advocate: Why would they need justification to at least keep records of where your licence plate has been in public? What expectation of privacy do you have?
As elsewhere, the expectation of "just another face in the crowd" pseudo-privacy.
When we (as a society, by which I mean my grandparents parents) agreed to have "unique identifiers" prominently displayed on vehicles we own, the reasoning behind that decision was based on a different reality.
This is _very much_ scope-creep - without anyone affected being asked whether it's OK.
If there was a proposal to have police all stop 1000 people per shift to check and record their ID, people and civil liberty groups would be up in arms (perhaps literally).
Is this _very_ much different? Shouldn't we at least have had a discussion about it before rolling it out without letting anybody know what was going on?
I'm not entirely sure what the US constitution says about a reasonable expectation of privacy, but I certainly have to wonder what the authors of it would have changed, had they envisioned a society in which the government could constantly, reliably, and ubiquitously surveil its' citizens.
That is, perhaps we shouldn't have an expectation of privacy in public, but for a long time, we had a reasonable expectation of relative anonymity, at least, the average person did.
Given the abuses we've seen throughout history (not just now), why on earth would I want the government to be able to know exactly where I am at any given time? If they think I've committed some crime let them use the normal protocols. Otherwise they need to fuck off.
http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic...