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Comment by ianstormtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Not saying I agree with OP, but for the law you described: any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description (unless you’ve explicitly disabled the automatic location and time stamping default).

So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.

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There’s a difference in intent, and you’re aware of that. Aggregating photos of license plates for the express purpose of building a database of license plates with location and other metadata to make profit from granting access to that database is clearly different to most other cases of taking, storing, and even selling photographs. There is no overlap here at all.

Its not hard to distugush individual pictures that contain trackable attributes like a license plate number from building a large scale database of them for sale. Or making such a database not legal to sell access to without removing that information, etc. It doesn't need to center on the contents of a single photo.

> any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description

I don't normally do that, unless I'm involved in an accident.

> So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.

And you think it's very hard to do that, legally speaking?

No I don’t think it’s “very hard”. But I also don’t pretend like OP that it’s super simple, only to suggest a law that would make most people criminals.

I think regulation is critically needed in this area, but acting like it’s easy to do well is a recipe for laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that have massive unexpected consequences.

Then make the act of selling it or storing it in a database with the intent to track people illegal?

Basing it around the act of selling data seems like a much better approach to me than what OP suggested, I agree. I imagine there are edge cases to consider around how acquisitions of company assets would work, although it’s not a use case I particularly care to defend.

“Intent to track” could be an approach, but the toll bridges near me use license plate scanners for payment, so I could see it not being that clear cut. There are likely other valid use cases, like statistical surveys, congestion pricing laws, etc.

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