Of all people, RMS gave a great talk at Hope XII ("We must legislate to block collection of personal data") about how these legal/technical issues can potentially be navigated.
Now, I'm not saying that cameras are the answer, but it is possible to make the technology work for us and not against us. For example, the license plate readers could be programmed to capture images of the license plates which expire after a certain amount of time, are cycled out if the vehicle is not in its previous location upon the next scan, are only accessible via strict access controls, etc. Of course, in RMS' vision, the software controlling these systems is Free and there would be some way for the citizenry to validate that it's doing what it purports to, the system is running an unmodified version, etc. As a matter of practicality, this is probably a pipe dream but it _is_ possible and his talk has made me reconsider my knee jerk Luddite reaction to technological solutions and I'd highly recommend watching/listening/reading the transcript.
Yeah it's definitely technically possible to create a system which would respect and not violate privacy but but the ones in use today definitely don't and that's the current alternative to chalking. On top of that I have a hard time seeing cities going through the work of designing the system you describe.
_Can_ be used later.
Of all people, RMS gave a great talk at Hope XII ("We must legislate to block collection of personal data") about how these legal/technical issues can potentially be navigated.
Now, I'm not saying that cameras are the answer, but it is possible to make the technology work for us and not against us. For example, the license plate readers could be programmed to capture images of the license plates which expire after a certain amount of time, are cycled out if the vehicle is not in its previous location upon the next scan, are only accessible via strict access controls, etc. Of course, in RMS' vision, the software controlling these systems is Free and there would be some way for the citizenry to validate that it's doing what it purports to, the system is running an unmodified version, etc. As a matter of practicality, this is probably a pipe dream but it _is_ possible and his talk has made me reconsider my knee jerk Luddite reaction to technological solutions and I'd highly recommend watching/listening/reading the transcript.