Many states already ban the private collection of license plate data.
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Which states are those? I'd like to read the statutes.
https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/automated-...
A friend entertained the idea of a startup focused on a social dashcam site, where users can upload clips of bad drivers tagged with their license plate number, and smart dashcams can alert to bad drivers in real time. They got as far as asking a lawyer before it fell apart.
Yikes. This smells a bit like Stasi-style surveillance. Unofficially encouraged by authorities. Rewards or social pressure or ideology turned a significant % of East Germans into Inoffizieller Mitarbeiters ("unofficial collaborators" or informants). Bad drivers today. And then ...
The point of the stasi collaborators was to undermine the targets personal relationships and isolate them because of the fear that they might be an informant.
Publicly posting the behavior or unaffiliated parties is nothing like the stasi.
Regardless of the official point of Stasi collaborators, what they did was contribute to millions of government surveillance files on fellow citizens. The similarity to a social network of public surveillance is the unpaid, unvetted, untrained manner, of collection with questionable motivation, be it social or political or simply anger.
Interestingly, the contributors may also be profiling themselves as able to and willing to surveil fellow citizens, should the opportunity arise.
The stasi had millions of files and no technical way to search them efficiently.
Random unpaid members of the public posting the most outrageous behavior they see is not a surveillance state. The chance that any one incident will be recorded is low.
I'm glad they did the research on this lol I thought about this a decade ago when I was doing a lot of driving and always thought it'd be something I'd explore. Good to know it's against the law
There's a nice list here with references to statutes: https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/automated-...
Just so we're clear, across all these statutes, the term "private" means "for private use". State and local governments can engage private firms to collect data in all of them.
I wonder how this figures in with states that don't permit any ALPR use by non-law enforcement. Presumably in those localities private entities can't collect ALPR data on behalf of law enforcement.
This page has some more background (and the most amusing map legend I've seen in awhile):
I did not know that. I do wish I lived in one.
One just needs to store personal data on license plates then. Handy.