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Comment by frgewut | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder what will happen when an average phone will be able to do ANPR easily...

They have been able to for years now.[0][1] If you want to wonder, imagine this tech being used to identify faces instead of plates.[2]

[0]https://github.com/SandroMachado/openalpr-android

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SZ3kDr-dYo

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMUpq-JRTIc

Don't think phone; think "car". Every computer-driven car will also be an ANPR/face-recognition vehicle that records and collects data about every single human and vehicle that it passes during the day, and sends that data back to its owner (which isn't you, it's Apple/Google/Tesla/Uber/Ford/whoever).

Companies with a self-driving car fleet will have fantastic amounts of information, considerably exceeding the U.S. spy agencies and law enforcement, about the movements of U.S. persons.

not really useful unless you also happen to have access to a license plate database.

Well, you have a data recorder. Add time, you have your data that you can store in a database.

Recording daily activities and movements of cars (uniquely identifiable by plates) is pretty interesting already, associating cars to persons can be made later.

You might even be able to detect suspicious activity, e.g. "KNHX-631 usually just commutes to and from work (shows up going downtown at around 8:30 every day, shows up going uptown 17:30 every day) and one day it showed up at 2:30 driving to leave the city, and returned at 5:30. There's a person reported missing that night..."

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