This is an issue that will only expand in scope as time goes by. When the ALPR tech was rolled out, it's purpose was stated as crime prevention/solving/safety in areas that had a crime problem. They even named the company "Flock Safety" to make it sound benign. Flock Surveillance would have made it a harder sell to city councils.
Now they are rapidly being deployed everywhere.
Right now, the Flock cameras cannot perform facial recognition.
How long do you think it will be before a need is determined and that capability is added.
Even if they don't, right now Flock provides cloud storage for all the images and those images are available, supposedly, only to other LE agencies. As this article below states, some of these ALPR systems have already been hacked.
So, if you are annoyed by targeted advertising from your phone listening in, wait until your location data is sold to the data brokers.
Many Lowe's locations now have Flock cameras and share the data with LE. The three in my area have multiple cameras in their parking lots.
Recently, the FAA issued a directive that the ADSB system that is intended for flight safety purposes be used only for that.
It has been being used by FBO's to identify aircraft owners and bill them for all the fees FBO's are notorious for adding on to your bill.
More unintended consequences.
How long before states with budget deficits figure out that for the price of a few Flock cameras, any road can be a toll road. Same for the states talking about eliminating income/property tax. That money has to be made up elsewhere, because we all know gov't is not going to curtail spending. This would be a way to make out of staters pick up some of the tab in states with a lot of tourism.
Can you say, "low hanging fruit"? (there's a Florida pun in there somewhere)
In the UK, the cameras are now used to levy "congestion fees" during certain hours in certain cities. They also use them to issue fines to ICE vehicles in "ZEZ" (zero emission zones). This is easy for them to do as all zero emissions vehicles have a green sticker on the license plate.
The point to all this is that surveillance is a slippery slope that as the tech becomes available and cheap is too tempting for gov't to ignore, both from a control aspect and as a revenue enhancement tool. Imagine getting a seat belt ticket in the mail from an automated system that creates revenue from camera images. Same for expired registration. Two new ways to pick your pocket where before they had one.
And if you are of the tin foil hat club, what do you think they will use if Claus Schwab gets his 15 minute city concept to fly? There are already 8-9 cities that have implemented or are about to implement the concept.
Right now, it's just encouraged, just like seat belt and hands free phone use was. Wouldn't it be awfully convenient if those "safety" cameras could be used for that too?
There is only one legal countermeasure to prevent your plate from being photographed, and it's not practical for daily use. None of the films/sprays/add on numbers are effective against the current generation of IR cameras. Most states also have added verbiage to their license plate statutes that prohibits anything that obscures the plate from electronic surveillance.
Government officials across the U.S. frequently promote the supposed, and often anecdotal, public safety benefits of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), but rarely do they examine how this very same technology poses risks to public safety that may outweigh the crimes they are attempting to...
www.eff.org
