In the US, at least, your license plate can get scanned by cameras driving around and you show up on security cameras (with improving facial recognition).
What's a domain analogous to computers without tracking? I suppose all those are "by computers" at the end of the day, but I can't think of anything I do that isn't tracked somehow.
I work in the public safety domain. You don’t even need a tracker on vehicles. There are several camera startups in this space, such as Flock Safety, which can scan for plates and particular vehicle descriptions and alert law enforcement. These devices are more common than you think. Agencies can also enter data sharing agreements. I work on the consuming end of data from systems like this.
You're on to something with automated license plate readers. They exist, as do apps that take pictures and videos and aggregate the license plate numbers.
Credit card transactions also aren't protected from marketing tracking activities, neither are Twitter or Facebook ads, neither is what my isp can discover from my dns requests, cell phone providers can sell my location metadata, and the credit bureaus are ordinary businesses with huge data leaks.
This is public information, police can operate on it without a warrant, and whether we're driving, flying a private jet, walking in a town square, or purchasing a coffee, or browse the internet - other private entities can too.
LifeLock and identity theft protection are sold to everybody, tax forms allow anybody to try to use someone else's number - the government refuses to do anything, and companies have minimum privacy + security requirements.
I usually just assume zero privacy anywhere these days. Your face is scanned, your image recorded, your license plate logged. Quite the world we have now.
It's a done deal: everywhere your car with a license plate goes is and will be tracked, and stored forever.
It's already happening, it is already cheap, and there's no way to stop it short of a massive swell of public support for enacting laws to limit it -- in the USA, that seems very unlikely.
What I think is important to extrapolate from this stuff is that everything we can do with license plate recognition now will soon be doable with facial recognition.
Tracking everywhere your car has been and storing the record forever is one thing. It's very hard to imagine that tracking everywhere your face has been isn't the next step.
The Federal government doesn't issue license plates, so the ability of the Feds to track your movements is a very similar comparison to Facebook. That tracking data isn't just used for criminal investigation... it's sold to insurance companies and other parties.
Rather than worry about this little tracking peculiarity, my mind wanders to a future where the govt is smart/capable/evil enough to be connecting all the cameras in buildings, cars, etc. into one place that constantly monitors for license plates and is able to tell:
-- anyone who has been driving around with a car registered in another state but hasn't relocated it to that state within a month (avoiding taxes -- CA I'm looking at you)
-- backtracking where someone who committed a crime came from, and has gone
I don't think oversight policies are nearly enough. The intrusion into your privacy is scary enough, even without marrying it to state-sanctioned violence. And automated license plate reading is quite possible with consumer electronics, which means that the only reason why things aren't getting tracked is that it's not profitable to track it yet.
There are services you can pay for (in the US) to track a car’s (almost) real-time location without gps. It’s based upon license plates and widespread webcams and it’s not illegal (yet).
Automated license plate readers spring to mind. The police have been noting license plates forever, automate it and suddenly now you have a database that tracks everyone's movements.
Depends on what they're built out to do. Highway traffic monitoring cameras don't (and usually aren't placed for a good angle to see them), toll enforcement cameras obviously do. Speed warnings signs are generally not cameras, I think, but radar, and hence don't.
Also, only the government can generally turn a plate number into a person's identity reliably (I doubt Google knows my license plate, though I'd be interested to know if they did), and even then, a license plate is far less likely to always identify a given person's movements than their phone's GPS.
I suspect both of these things are nearly impossible in the US. At some point you will have to talk to police, if only to identify yourself. At some point you will be tracked, if only by your license plate, or soon your face.
maybe not, but those technologies are spreading everywhere... including license plate readers at every corners... which is why Steve Jobs didn't have one on his car... But he could have been tracked some other ways... with the wireless sensors in his tires for example (and most cars communicate wirelessly with the manufacturer)
Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated.
Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end.
And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement.
Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).
What's a domain analogous to computers without tracking? I suppose all those are "by computers" at the end of the day, but I can't think of anything I do that isn't tracked somehow.
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