[maxerickson]

U.S. law has moved away from that idea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

But it should still be straightforward to make laws saying that the tags on a vehicle are a particular type of information and then restrict the way that businesses are allowed to use it.

[bertil]

Indeed on the copyright of collection -- which as a fact was abused; but not the change of nature of the information.

I really don’t think that you can make enough information particular enough to get away with disanonymisation techniques: you standing anywhere in a city, with a block accuracy is enough to identify most people on a transport map; even whether you like a handful of movies, and in what order or when you saw them is enough to isolate individuals from a VoD database.

[maxerickson]

A company can make use of the observations without aggregating them. For instance, if they have a documented interest in a tag, I don't really have a problem with them disseminating it to their vehicles and checking it against live scans.