The city I used to live in did a trial. They recovered more stolen cars in the first month they tried it than the whole year before. Here’s a press release about the program in general[1].
[1]https://www.brookhavenga.gov/police/page/brookhaven-police-c...
The benefits are real, but without safeguards it will be abused: police officers and, in this case, also power utility workers likely have full, unaudited access to this data. That means they'll use it to stalk and harass people, e.g. ex-girlfriends, in addition to legit uses.
This is such a common trope, and it should be fairly well-known by now how so many American cops are basically bullies with guns, that I really have to wonder why any sane woman would ever date one. Horror stories about the things the ex-girlfriends and ex-wives of cops have gone through have been around for many decades, it's not something new. I have seen a non-negligible number of women on online dating sites who have specifically said they would not date anyone in law enforcement.
technically the car is stolen from the place that holds the note.. but I don't think the malls and other places that have installed these and sold the data are really wanting to put our press releases about how many broke people late on their payments they turned over to repo men/women..
They used that excuse to put some in at the airport near here, but I have second hand knowledge that they have been used to Id other people and investigate other things, so that data is not in a read - only - plates put into the db that are stolen and get info back, it's db data that is there and searchable shareable for other reasons, most the general public may never know.
Everything is a balance between privacy and security. In a perfect world the cameras wouldn't be abused, but in a perfect world there wouldn't be any crime.
Personally I think we don't need any more tracking in our lives, and I'd gladly swap some stolen cars in order to avoid a surveillance dystopia.