[apendleton]

I agree that the license plate situation is a concern, but banning the scanners is the wrong fix. I could organize a group of friends to all point cameras out our windows and do the same thing, without the help of government (and in fact, have sort of considered doing so just as experiment, to prove how trivial it would be). The privacy incursion occurs when the government requires you to attach an easily recordable unique public identifier to your vehicle, not when they document sightings of the identifier. Once you put the license plates on the cars, you've lost already -- anybody could be looking, and you'd never know; it'd be basically impossible to regulate.

Not to say I don't think there should be license plates; obviously there's a public safety argument for having them, and that argument has to be counterbalanced against the privacy concerns (and perhaps rebalanced as technologies advance and change the relative difficulty of some kinds of privacy-invading tasks). But focusing on the scanner is pointless. More broadly: acknowledging that people trivially have access to tons of data that, when taken together, damages privacy, and trying to fix the privacy problem by telling them they're not allowed to look at it, is never going to end well. If the problem is solvable at all, it's by controlling access to the data in the first place.

[cortesoft]

I wasn't arguing that we should ban any technology or telling people not to look at them.

What I was trying to say is that being able to do something fast and at scale is not just a progressive improvement from being able to do them slowly and by hand; it is actually fundamentally changing what the thing means. What we decide to do with this fact is another question.