http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic...
I'd love to know the justification the city of San Leandro use to explain why they're keeping photographic records of cars, owners, and their families - and just how uptight the police/city-officials would be if I took photos of them and their families in their driveways at the rate of "1000s every eight hours"…
That is, perhaps we shouldn't have an expectation of privacy in public, but for a long time, we had a reasonable expectation of relative anonymity, at least, the average person did.
When we (as a society, by which I mean my grandparents parents) agreed to have "unique identifiers" prominently displayed on vehicles we own, the reasoning behind that decision was based on a different reality.
This is _very much_ scope-creep - without anyone affected being asked whether it's OK.
If there was a proposal to have police all stop 1000 people per shift to check and record their ID, people and civil liberty groups would be up in arms (perhaps literally).
Is this _very_ much different? Shouldn't we at least have had a discussion about it before rolling it out without letting anybody know what was going on?