[300bps]

I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour.

I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right?

We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem.

How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-atheists-we-dis...). I guess the problem isn't their boss checking via license plate scanning whether or not they go to church every week, their behavior is the problem.

I guess we better tell political dissidents to knock it off too.

And let's not forget abuse of the data. You seem to think that this data is perfectly protected, perfectly monitored. You really can't imagine a scenario where a rogue cop pulls over a young girl, becomes obsessed with her and then begins stalking her by abusing electronic tracking systems he has access to? It's happening already - Google gave me too many examples to cite.

Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation

This is astoundingly pseudo-intellectual tripe. The reality is that what people do in their own private lives is none of your business, and people seeking to track people's every movements are evil.

[dntrkv]

I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right?

No. But if you are lying, you have to realize that you can be caught. The fact that some kind of technology makes it easier for you to be caught is not the technologies fault. Phones, cameras, computers, internet, all make it easier for you to be caught doing something you weren't supposed to be doing.

Should it be illegal for photographers to take pictures of people in public? What if that photographer publishes the pictures on their blog? What about people taking pictures/videos of police officers? Should they be allowed to upload these pictures/videos to the internet?

We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem.

No, the problem is people that have problems with homosexuals.

How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-atheists-we-dis...). I guess the problem isn't their boss checking via license plate scanning whether or not they go to church every week, their behavior is the problem.

Again, the problem here is the boss checking the license plates to make sure the employee goes to church. It's not that the plates are being logged, it's that the data is being used in a malicious manner.

[logfromblammo]

Did you forget Murphy's Law? If it is possible for the data to be used in a malicious manner, someone will eventually use them with ill intent.

The key to preventing abuse is to make it more difficult by several orders of magnitude than allowable uses. One way to do this is to only store plate scan records where there is a pre-existing reason to track the location of the vehicle, and purge those records once that reason is no longer valid.

You can't search what is not stored.

[countrybama24]

> It's not that the plates are being logged, it's that the data is being used in a malicious manner

Is it easier to prevent abuse post-hoc or ban types of data gathering prone to abuse?

[TeMPOraL]

> We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem.

No, my point is that it's the people doing the checking to then hurt others that are the problem, not the tools used to track, and not even the act of tracking.

> You really can't imagine a scenario where a rogue cop pulls over a young girl, becomes obsessed with her and then begins stalking her(...)

I can, but again, it's the cop who is the problem, not Google or Facebook or ALPRs.

> This is astoundingly pseudo-intellectual tripe.

It may sound like that for people who don't grok it, but it's actually also the base for my whole argument. If you understand this "tripe", then you can see that there are pretty much infinite ways you can use to obtain particular information; they only differ in cost. You can't ban them all. Progress of technology only reduces the cost of accessing some facts about the real world.

Let's look for ways to stop people from doing bad things instead of trying to fight the progress, with all the benefits it brings. For centuries we relied on limited access to information as a proxy for safety. We can't do that anymore.

[countrybama24]

> Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation

Like tracking, which could be used by political authorities to suppress political dissidents, employers to discriminate against homosexuals, or police to stalk or sexually harass a young woman.

Just because Google or Facebook or ALPRs don't intend for tracking to be used maliciously doesn't mean it won't. In fact, this is the entire argument against the NSA dragnet.