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Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It's ok for me to track and then publish the info, right?

We're all equal when we are in public view, right?

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I've long wanted to setup a system like this.

Cameras facing all entrances and exits of the state capitol would be fed into ALPR and facial recognition software. There are enough photos of elected officials to train facial recognition. It would be easy to identify who is coming and going, what cars they own, who they travel with, and their patterns.

NYT did it.

https://open.nytimes.com/how-the-new-york-times-uses-softwar...

Politicians should have less right to privacy than us citizens.

Everyone with substantial power should have less privacy. Politicians should have almost none.

That was a core idea for the British Establishment.

Public school was where children went to learn how to operate in public life. The rest of the population had less privilege, but more privacy.

That just sounds like journalism to me, so: "Yes, it's ok."

Says you. But will the police/FBI/DA agree, or say it's terroristic stalking?

But why do you care ?

Imagine license plate readers all over town committing license plate numbers to a blockchain.

California is already rolling out "smart" licence plates, so not far off.

What do you mean by "committing license plate numbers to a blockchain"?

Probably that the records are preserved in some way that they can't be redacted or removed later.

What records? I don't understand what this is supposed to describe. Just writing every plate number some device has seen to the append-only DB? Is that it? What's value in that?

I think the value would be with recording a location and time with the plate number, not just that a plate exists.

Add MAC addresses passing through major intersections and you've got some quality data to work with.

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