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Comment by soundgecko | Hacker News Reader

What's to stop individuals or companies from using the same tech to collect data? After all, what you do in public is public, and private detectives are allowed to follow and film their targets in public to show their clients and use in court.

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In my city there's a very big department store (El Corte Inglés, if you're curious) which uses this technology in their entrance/exit. They've been doing this for years, and it's obvious they're collecting customer data.

There are very good reasons for some businesses to use ALPR technology. EasyPass and other automatic toll-collection schemes use RFID tags on cars to uniquely identify them. There are parking-lot control systems that use RFID tags to allow access to paid parking lots. ICS, the largest vendor of car wash management systems, sells an RFID subscription package. One of their tags is on my car's windshield: http://www.icscarwashsystems.com/index.php?product=17

ALPR has some technical and business advantages over RFID. The RFID car-identification solution has been around over ten years; ALPR wasn't as effective then. If it has been, we'd probably have ALPR toll-collection systems instead of RFID.

I hope this pushback against ALPR won't extend to private uses of it for reasonable and limited purposes.

We _do_ have ALPR toll systems, at least here in California. You can leave your Fastrak RFID in your kitchen drawer forever, as long as you associate your license plates with your Fastrak account.

Nice. I didn't know that. I wonder when they started that? https://www.bayareafastrak.org/vector/dynamic/signup/VTconfi...

Illinois' tollways use cameras (and RFID) as well, but yes, you could leave the pass behind and it'd all work without issue.

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