Many malls are high crime areas. Car theft is often much higher at malls, for example. The owners of these malls
have a responsibility to provide a safe environment.
There have been a few malls in our area that closed after gang related activity and violence in their vicinity became known. If you are a mall owner and have this happen, would you not be remiss to take measures to try to know who is visiting your property and using it as a place to conduct illegal activities?
If a car shows up that is registered to someone on a warrant for a violent crime, should the mall owner do nothing? Not their business?
What about a car registered to someone who lost their license due to DUI? What if that person frequents the mall and kills someone with their car?
You need to lay off the FUD! The reason these are installed generally has nothing to do with crime (outside parking enforcement at most). It’s done for marketing and tracking purposes. Brick and mortar stores are desperate for the kind of data that online retailers have access to about customers and the folks making the purchasing decisions generally don’t have the first clue about privacy implications.
Source: I worked for a company doing something vaguely similar (we covered the inside of stores, not the parking lot). I spent my time there working to provide best in class anonymization to only allow aggregate data.
As to your specific fear mongering questions:
> If a car shows up that is registered to someone on a warrant for a violent crime, should the mall owner do nothing? Not their business?
1) that data isn’t generally publicly available to them
2) that’s why you hire security guards
> What about a car registered to someone who lost their license due to DUI? What if that person frequents the mall and kills someone with their car?
1) again, not generally publicly available
2) what makes you think the drivers licenseless person could be the only driver
There is a Costco shopping center near me that has had a few cases of straight up wheel theft during the height of their shopping times that were not solved until they tracked plates, but alas, this seems like a case of the blade cutting both ways.
I want to say "Screw ICE", but this does seem like a valid case of tracking who is frequenting their lots.
There have been a few malls in our area that closed after gang related activity and violence in their vicinity became known. If you are a mall owner and have this happen, would you not be remiss to take measures to try to know who is visiting your property and using it as a place to conduct illegal activities?
If a car shows up that is registered to someone on a warrant for a violent crime, should the mall owner do nothing? Not their business?
What about a car registered to someone who lost their license due to DUI? What if that person frequents the mall and kills someone with their car?