I see a black pickup with plate readers drive by my kids school daily as we all wait in line to get our kids. I guess they sell the data to whomever....

When I lived in NC, people drover around the stores and Wally World recording plate info. I guess someone somewhere buys the info.

I had an aqaquantance who drove a tow truck and he said that some repo companies subcontracted him to pick up cars and even provided likely times the cars would be at different stores.

Can these POS things read your rear plate after you’ve passed or just the front? I never put the front plates on our vehicles.

Can these POS things read your rear plate after you’ve passed
Yes. Otherwise they would be useless.

Does anyone think the freeway cams that tell you how crowded it is and the average speed don't record EVERYTHING?
Morning news traffic reports show a bunch and if there's an accident, there's probably a camera nearby that sees it.

Easily. The ones I see on cop car's face forward, to read rear plates as the drive by, or front plates as the drive on the opposite side.

quote:

Originally posted by dry-fly:
Can these POS things read your rear plate after you’ve passed or just the front? I never put the front plates on our vehicles.

If you see that trailer in my city, don’t worry about the DEA. I had to refresh my msdos skills to get it running after we forgot about it one winter and a business took it inside their garage. They finally called us and said is this yours three years later. The guy in charge of it retired and the rest of us forgot about it. Had to wire up new batteries for it and build an rs232 cable so I could program it.

We also had a hidden box one which was left on a pole for over a year. We had to drive around the city looking for it. We’re too busy to do this traffic crap.

1100 lumin flashlight on strobe mode. Give them something to look at.

Just a simple point of order... If you are on a public road, it isn't "spying." You are in public and have no expectation of privacy...

As to the rest, I won't touch that yet.

quote:

Originally posted by KevinCW:
Just a simple point of order... If you are on a public road, it isn't "spying." You are in public and have no expectation of privacy...

As to the rest, I won't touch that yet.

Yup. I maybe uncomfortable but it is not illegal.

The reason the privacy issue is going to fall apart in trying to challenge this, at least legally is that their simply recording publicly visible information. They're not entering anyone's private property. They're not opening people's mail. They're just recording the passing traffic. Of course, technology has made doing that have much more of an impact than it used to be.

Hear's another one that's going to eventually have a lot of impact. Facial recognition has had a spotty reputation until now. But it's steadily getting better. LE now tend to have a lot of cameras on the streets (and can network with some private camera installations.) And since the advent of photo IDs, essentially have everyone's picture to work with. How is that going to play out?

How many gigabytes do these devices accrue each day nationally?

Where is all this information stored?

Who sifts through all this data?

What are they looking for?

Who cares if I happen to drive up Pothole Avenue on Tuesday afternoon at 2pm?