[awalGarg]

I am not sure why this comment was marked dead without any responses, and hence I am "vouch"-ing for it. Can someone point to laws related to license plate tracking?

It seems to me that having a huge database of known locations of vehicles could be used to do some cool (but likely immoral) things, specially coupled with the fact that several state agencies all over the world make it free and easy to retrieve licensing and ownership information for vehicles. It'd also be relatively much easier to do compared to facial recognition.

[noway421]

Big question is, how would you do it at scale? You can crowdsorce data, but then it's hardly precise or frequently updated data. Sort of a thing that vinwiki does now. Govt has a head start on it with speed cameras/traffic light cameras etc, but there only so many of them.

The wildest idea I can think of is using reverse camera on every car and recognizing the plate of the car which is tail gating you. Now, that's more interesting, but how much of a fleet you would need to track down a random car.

Not something car manufacturers would do either, even with their love of telemetry.

[Theophraustous]

I don't recall the exact article, but I believe they "crowd source" the data via repo-men & tow trucks with automatic scanners. https://drndata.com/