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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> Either it needs a warrant or it’s fully open and people can start creating websites showing the movements of local politicians.

What?

There is a lot of information privy to police that should not be accessible to anyone. This is such a ridiculous standard. I would want police to know where I live and contact information of my emergency contact for instance, but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.

> There’s been too many cases of police officers stalking exes, poking around the data for fun and such so it’s clear police cannot be trusted with the data without better court oversight.

There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff. Those police that abuse their power should be brought to justice and its obviously against policies, but to simply remove their ability to effectively do their job is not the answer

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"someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down"

Sounds reasonable, but most police departments will not do this, even if the data is available to them and running the query is easy.

They will tell you to file a report, preferably online, which will then be incorporated in local stats, and may also be useful in your interactions with your insurance company.

But they will not do anything to help your specific case.

Okay, but they should. Putting up barriers like warrants would make it less likely they do something.

> I would want police to know where I live ... but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.

Oddly, this was 100% commonplace before about 2000 or so, in the US at least. Every household got a free phone book from the phone company that contained the name, address, and phone number of everyone in town. I think you could opt out, but almost no one did.

It was incredibly handy and sometimes I still miss it. I'm not 100% sure why it was considered OK for so many decades but today would be considered a PII data leak, though I suppose it being limited to your local area vs. searchable by the whole world has something to do with it.

> There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff.

I'm not, especially since anecdotally, police are generally unwilling to use these tools to solve petty crime anyway.

This is fair, but in my mind, there's still data that's way too accessible for police without proper oversight. What I'd prefer is a system where if the police access it without court approval, they generate a post-access review to confirm that the police did it for a valid reason, such as an emergency. Otherwise, I think any traditional access to that kind of data should have to be via court order.

These companies provide an audit log. This is the obvious answer to prevent abuse rather than relying on courts. Imagine the senior officer or overseer or governing body gets a ping every time a license plate is requested. This isn't a novel problem. Millions of people have access to information like PII in the financial world and they manage it without all the hoops.

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