[calebio]

> A lower resolution tracking is still tracking though. Spatial resolution is low/fixed doesn’t change the fact that I was tagged using the personally identifiable plate and my movements were tracked across the town.

You're not wrong that it's still tracking. Though, whether it's tracking or not isn't really the thing up for debate here.

In my head it's:

A) Whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy from a person or company when driving your car with a personally identifiable plate on a public street.

B) Is it your data that is being searched or is it the data of the company who owns the ALPR? Is it a violation of your rights for that data to be searched?

The decision in Carpenter is extremely narrow and doesn't cover things like cameras or non-targeted tower dumps.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

It's also similar to the ever growing network of toll road cameras and bridge/highway cameras that capture an image of each car + driver's face.

[garyfirestorm]

Isn’t tracking part of “search”? wouldn’t you need a warrant or court order to request my cellphone gps data? How is this tracking/search not contradictory to unreasonable search portion of the 4th amendment. The action of tracking and touching flock itself is violation of 4th amendment.

[calebio]

No, it's not. You are not protected from a private company that owns ALPRs as part of the 4th amendment.

The government purchasing data from 3rd parties (the third-party doctrine) doesn't violate your 4th amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. You voluntarily gave the data to a 3rd party and the 3rd party voluntarily sold that data to the government.

The carve out is really only for phone GPS data (cell tower connection logs) as specified in Carpenter v. United States.

So just like you're not protected from AT&T selling your call logs to the government, you're not protected from Flock selling access to their images of your car (at this time).