GM Cruise autonomous taxi pulled over by police in San Francisco without humans

More than just the police have access to those systems and they are frequently abused already. Volunteer at a DV clinic for just a few weeks and you'll likely run across at least one person who had those systems play a role in their stalking or harassment.

It's usually a clerical worker with access but pretty often a cop. Just limiting access to certain groups isn't sufficient. It also needs to be restricted by time and purpose, audited with harsh consequences. Something the current systems already are not, so I wouldn't expect this to be.

The fact that one unrighteous power exists is not a good argument for another one.

I think we need to see some sources about how secure that data is. A lot of it can just be purchased, like repo men can. Stuff like your home location, work location, other locations you spend significant time at and can be photographed from the street, etc. The stuff they get through NCIC (registration, warrants, firearm license, etc) can be obtained by tow truck drivers who have access to the system, or through some of the background check services online. This sort of data hardly difficult to obtain.

Real-time phone location tracking is probably the only one that is more difficult to get. Even then, there have been cases where officers have abused that. Really, the reason more criminals don't use it is that the targets tend to be more random so it's easier to track a stranger using an airtag or GPS tag.

And of course, there have already been some people showing that stuff like onstar can be hacked to remotely stop a vehicle, not just by the cops.

The apps that power this sort of tracking are private entities which I’m sure check very low bar compliance checkboxes but have very little practical security or privacy engineering behind them.

They are absolutely abused by black hat resellers of this access to a broader audience for profit, and I would bet a large sum of money that there is more than a few groups who have infiltrated these companies simply to retain the ability to query this data for their own (nefarious) means like kidnapping/ransom/blackmail.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/gykgv9/securus-phone-trackin...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...