Cheap automatic license plate readers are creeping into neighborhoods

There are an increasing number of things that were so person-hour intensive before that they were legal but not practical, with the understanding the police would only do them if they had a good reason, like following a suspect as they went about their day. Now with the ability to do it so cheaply I think we have to acknowledge that in these cases a difference in degree has essentially become a difference in kind and we need to go back from square one and evaluate how we use these tools.

I want one. Specifically I want one that includes a directional microphone to detect noise violations, then automatically tweets the lic plate number, time, street, direction to the police, and then continues to collect the information providing predictive tweets to the police (Lic plate XYZ is likely to pass at location A at time Y with a volume 10x the legal limit). I live next to a noisy street and sound insulating my bedroom is over $10k. This would be a much cheaper solution to the neighbors crotch rocket at 4am.

It is dead easy to set up a raspberry pi to do license plate recognition.

In python, it's probably 10 lines of code.

Once you import the openalpr library, then you get a routine that in one call takes a jpg image and returns an array of <plate-number>, <confidence %> pairs.

License plates are public information. There is no website or state DMV that you, a private citizen, can go to and get the information on the plate's owner.

It's not only about the big companies being accountable for holding data. What about private individuals uploading gigabytes of data to the public web?

So could someone mount these cameras on private property with views of major highways and stand up a subscription service?