[Bartweiss]

Readable, sure. They provided a way to identify the owners of specific cars without stopping them.

But with the advent of digital photography, image recognition, and computerized databases, they do something very different. They make it possible to track everyone passing through a place, and to correlate every sighting of someone to build up a profile of their life.

Sure, surveillance isn't novel. But a sufficient quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. Bulk tracking of everyone in a city is something completely new, and there's good reason to be uncomfortable with it.

[thrownaway2424]

I don't disagree with your facts but I also don't think they lead to your conclusion. One does not expect privacy in public, by definition.

[pdkl95]

Privacy isn't a simple Boolean value; there are degrees of privacy that depend on what's protected, the environment/situation, cultural expectations and awareness, and many other variables. For example, you expect privacy for your body because you wear clothes, even though you "have no expectation of privacy" because you are in public.

When the laws requiring license plates were originally created, there was a certain understanding about how that would impact society. Sure, anybody could see them, but you needed a lot of expensive manpower to track one person for a long time or everybody at any time. The impact of having the data "in public" was inherently limited.

Now that technology has removed that limitation, the consequences of having a license plate in public view have changed. Pretending that this new situation is addressed with the outdated logic we used to define "no pubic expectation of privacy" assumes that the old definitions of privacy are still valid, which is patently incorrect.

[rtkwe]

It's the accumulation and correlation of the data that's the problem. At a high enough density you essentially have everyone being followed their entire lives. Formerly if the police wanted to know everywhere that a person visited because they suspected them of crime X they'd have to invest a certain level of resources which means targets had to be chosen judiciously. Now we're approaching a point where they can just trawl everyone's movements looking for anything they like, and as the algorithms get better and the density of things like CCTV and the license plate readers increases it gets easier and easier to follow anyone back in time.

IF the police were filled with perfect angels and laws were all perfectly reasonable and just allowing that might approach being ok. Instead we have a police force made of people who do things like harass whistle blowers who reveal corruption or cover ups or people they have personal vendettas against (or unrequited love toward).

[baconner]

This is clearly true, but legally speaking I think it's time we start reevaluating as a society how far we let this swing. Technology has changed the meaning of no reasonable expectation of privacy dramatically. 100 years ago you couldn't expect not to be overheard or followed (at great cost per individual followed). Today you can't expect not to be recorded and location tracked at all times and it's low cost per person so everyone can be followed and surveiled all the time.

We can disagree if this is a net positive or negative to society, but IMO a lot of folks are treating it as if nothing has changed because the core law hasn't changed. That's missing the point - the scale change is very significant.

[orbitingpluto]

One also doesn't expect to look over their shoulder and be constantly stalked. But it's okay because it is the government?

[JTxt]

Said from a throwaway account?

It's likely possible to figure out your identity from what, when, and where you post online publicly... Especially by someone that has the resources to collect and data mine much of what is posted.

Would that be ok?

I don't think so, unless it's part of a legal and targeted investigation.

[thrownaway2424]

My throwaway account is as anonymous as yours. I use it because it's been logged in in Chrome for the last five years and I'm lazy. I don't see how "JTxt" differs from "thrownaway2424"