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by aasasd 2542 days ago
> When you drive on public roads, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy

Would you say that someone stalking you all day every day is alright if it's in public?

(Also, you seem to have missed that the police aren't using photos from just road cameras, but that's beside the argument really.)

1 comments

Sorry, I think I failed to clarify my point. I don't think ubiquitous vehicle position tracking is legal, or a good idea. I do think that if you're a driver on public roads, your face will be photographed at some point (such as for your license), and _that's_ legal and to be expected.
As far as I know, the problem here is police running photos that it has from some cameras against the DMV database. Which is a) apparently of dubious legality because it's a biometric search and should be done in a criminal case but is instead done promiscuously left and right; and b) is ethically dubious because it creeps into the territory of ubiquitous surveillance.

Vehicles and roads don't enter the equation apart from people having gotten driver licenses. The licenses just make the largest database of US citizens' faces.

As far as I know, there isn't a problem here.

> [...] of dubious legality because it's a biometric search and should be done in a criminal case [...]

That is not the law. You have been misled, perhaps as the article's author intended. The author's feelings on whether such searches should be legal are not the same as democratically-enacted laws on the matter.