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There's several things to worry about: 1. ALPR, when positioned strategically, can be as effective (if not more so) than GPS. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last
by peterwwillis 11y ago
There's several things to worry about:
1. ALPR, when positioned strategically, can be as effective (if not more so) than GPS. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that police need a court order to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car, but no such order is needed for ALPR. They're also passive, so there's no way to detect them, and you can't really avoid them when driving. They can also be combined with stationary cameras to increase the surveillance area.
2. The mobile phone data of a carrier is only searchable with a warrant. Some agencies use Stingrays without a warrant (thanks, Baltimore City, for the heads up) to track people illegally, but they would need many deployed throughout an area to triangulate, and they wouldn't be as accurate.
3. You can turn a phone off, but you can't make a car invisible. (You could change the plates, but 99.99999999% of the citizens being tracked have no reason, nor access, to do this)
4. Access to the data is basically unrestricted to the police force, and they can keep it for a long time, and they have no oversight. The ACLU says that in 45 states there are no laws on how long police can keep the records.
5. They can be abused easily:
"In 1998, a Washington D.C. police lieutenant pleaded guilty to extortion after blackmailing the owners of vehicles parked near a gay bar.[45] In 2015, the Los Angeles Police Department proposed sending letters to the home addresses of all vehicles that enter areas of high prostitution.[46][47][48]" [1] In NYC, they used it to track people who went to a mosque in Queens, amongst other places. [2]
What's funny is that private companies have been operating ANPR units for years, and have private databases you can pay to search, similar to other data-selling companies that people like private investigators and creditors have been using for the past 15 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recogni... [2] http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2012/Newark-mayor-seeks-probe-of-NYPD-Muslim-spying http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2012/Newark-mayor-s...