
California Police Chiefs Misrepresent License Plate Privacy Bill - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-police-chiefs-misrepresent-license-plate-privacy-bill
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Simulacra
It worries me greatly when communities, businesses, another private entities
start recording the license plates.

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krapp
Why? License plates are meant to be public, that's why they're on the outside
of cars, where anyone can see them. It's no more sinister than knowing your
name and address.

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vijayr
_Why?_

Your phone number is public, but you wouldn't be happy if the lat/long of your
phone during various times of the day is public, right?

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krapp
Maybe not, but if I knew when I bought the phone that I would be legally
required to carry a placard around with my current lat/long on it, I wouldn't
be shocked if people knew where I was, even if I put the sign down once in a
while.

I've got no real issue with being able to cover your plates while parked, but
doing so doesn't do much to prevent surveillance or identification - that much
is even mentioned in the article.

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on_and_off
I am genuinely curious : why do people want to cover their plates while the
car is parked ?

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b6
Well, police cars are driving around all the time. Tireless electronic eyes
look out of the vehicle for plates, and records of every single one are made:
timestamp, location, etc. The vast majority of the data collected is on people
who are not suspected of any crime. But the data can be misused in innumerable
ways. It would be easy to pick out patterns and then flag deviations, like the
patterns show that this guy works from 8-5, but for some reason, his car was
at a hotel from 1-3. On and on.

There are lots of reasons to not want this kind of omniscient eye on us. My
favorite is that a lot of laws are wrong, and people are violating the laws
righteously, and they will be vindicated by public opinion someday, but it's
going to take time for everyone to catch up. We don't want perfect police.
There needs to be some slop so that we can see where the laws are wrong.

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jaclaz
>Well, police cars are driving around all the time. Tireless electronic eyes
look out of the vehicle for plates, and records of every single one are made:
timestamp, location, etc. The vast majority of the data collected is on people
who are not suspected of any crime. But the data can be misused in innumerable
ways.

And - as a side note - whenever there is information stored (and poorly
protected, i.e. "always") there is a good chance it will go in the hands of
someone that is not the police or government.

There is the known case of the Oakland Police ALPR, which data was initially
available through public record request:

[http://records.oaklandnet.com/request/8562](http://records.oaklandnet.com/request/8562)

Now the data is not "public record" anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if -
one way or the other - data harvesting companies would be able to get a copy.

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Blazespinnaker
“Data collected by EFF from across the state show that only .08% of vehicle
plates captured by police ALPRs are connected to a crime.

Lol. What percentage of cars are connected to crime?

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mcny
Why are you running data if you don't suspect a crime?

A friend of mine moved to a new neighborhood. Apparently, her neighbor was in
the police. She said she was out walking her dog and the neighbor greeted her
with her first name and middle name when she had barely moved in. We didn't
know her legal middle name was different from what we called her. So we pretty
much know he looked her up (driving licence info?) and he wants her to know he
looked her up.

Why? Who knows but he did.

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metilda
Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime in and of itself that officers and
anyone else with access (admin personnel & some security guards) are commonly
prosecuted for.

We should have a right to security in our information, and privacy of it from
meddlers and nefarious actors like the aformentioned neighbor. Sadly, many of
my fellow Americans are all to happy to claim they have nothing to hide,
despite how much that attitude continues to hurt them.

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b6
> Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime

I'm not disagreeing with this, but I don't think we can trust people to make a
system that, e.g., automatically collects and stores the locations of all cars
with plates visible to all the roving police cars -- and then not use that
information improperly.

I'm hoping that we'll gradually choose deliberate ignorance of certain things
we _could_ know because although the knowledge could be helpful in certain
cases, it's also too dangerous.

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r00fus
There shouldn't need to be such a choice. Make both more difficult - license
plate tracking and inappropriate lookups.

