I don't see how a license plate camera is any different than a regular surveillance camera. It's even less invasive since it only records license plates and presumably deletes the rest of the recording.
As it stands for now, the privacy implications of regular surveillance cameras are limited by storage and the computing & manpower needed to analyze every frame. It's pretty certain your local police department isn't storing every frame recorded by area highway cameras for several years back; they are doing that for license plate readers, though.
So if you forced police to manually go through the list of license plates every camera recorded, and find the one they want, that would be ok? But if they made a script to do the exact same thing automatically, it's illegal?
Leave the house with the zipper down on Monday. Have a silly argument with a neighbor on Friday. Isolated incidents that will end up in the "Worst of Houshalter" - file, either available for everyone, or just a group of decisionmakers.
Am I seeing this right, or am I exaggerating?
I see warning signs all over the place, that this train/building/place etc. is under video surveillance.
Cool story bro. Details? Who's looking at the data? How long will it be stored? How is that data protected?
I tried out SimpleCV recently, and was fascinated how much already works out of the box. Face recognition from a video is basically the "Hello World" program.
The phrase "Wake up sheeple" has been discredited as wannabe-enlightened, but in this case I feel like opening my window and shouting it out loud. Sigh.
These privacy laws could be really damaging to progress. In some cases it basically makes it illegal to make a machine do the same thing as a human.
No, we virtually eliminate crime of anyone that isn't friends with the bureau that manages the cameras
I don't automatically have a problem with that. Progress at any cost isn't something I take as "obviously good" and machines don't have rights to employment.
That's ignoring the fact that you want the machine to do it because it's not doing "the same thing", it's doing something slightly different.
If you make a comb with teeth too fine, it will rip out your hair.
You don't want omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient mechanical enforcement of the law. You may think you do, but you really don't.
'“It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” Sotomayor wrote in 2012. “This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”'
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-sotomayor-undermined-obamas-n...
Otherwise stop it, a computer is no different a tool than a dog.
Maybe we should re-examine the analogy -- are computers with perfect vision, that never look away, and perfectly record any observation they are able to make, really comparable to cops? Are the resulting huge bodies of data that can be retroactively searched, really comparable to anything that existed before?
This is a half-developed thought admittedly; I'm not sure it's a good argument, or what should be done.
Your "less invasive" point is wrong, even if what you 'presume' is correct.
Walking around outside is not considered private. Following someone in public is considered stalking and is illegal. You can do things in public and still claim some semblance of privacy.
Actually, simply following someone around in public is not stalking and not illegal in itself. Private investigators, process servers, and repo men do this all the time.[1] Stalking requires some sort of contact, direct or indirect (e.g., making your presence known).
[1] Regardless of your opinion of those trades and the people who ply them, their activities are legal.
I'm not licensed nor bonded in any way of any profession.
What am I to be charged with exactly?
Also: collecting data on a human by a human does not scale. Large-scale automated data collection on the other hand takes on a wholly different character. Let's say someone became your political adversary fifteen years from now and you don't know it today because he is in college. You needed to dig up dirt on him, and you find out that while in college he was a prolific consumer of "My Little Pony" porn. Automation makes such a scenario possible. Without it you would have to send staffers through archives, and that's only worth it for the biggest targets.