But there has never been any expectation of privacy when in public. Especially when it comes to something regulated like driving a car. Should there be some change in the law now forbidding collecting licence plate data because it is easier to do en-masse?
"But there has never been any expectation of privacy when in public."
There's been an assumption about "just another face in the crowd" pseudo-privacy though.
"Should there be some change in the law now forbidding collecting licence plate data because it is easier to do en-masse?"
Yeah, I think there should. There's a fundamental difference between law enforcement (or even commercial businesses) being able to target specific people or locations to do time-limited licence plate collection - and this new "record everything and archive it all forever" surveillance capability.
I don't claim to "know for sure that everybody considers it wrong", but I do claim that so far nobody has asked if I think it's OK. There are examples of industries that have tight regulation over the privacy-relevant data they collect and store (medical, financial, childcare are a few I've bumped into) - we should at least have the discussion about whether people involved in widespread collection of vehicle location/time data should have HIPPA/PCI type regulation of that practice, and some well known (and enforced) repercussions for mis-using that data.
That's the question, isn't it? LE uses facial recognition to scan crowds. Now cars are tracked, not using GPS, an observing officer, or a member of the public (who may need to report a crime), but by snarfing video of all the license plates with a geolocated camera, timestamping and OCRing them, and storing the resulting information.
The next thing that pops into my head is the fingerprint. Not because it's "easy" to get, but you also have no reasonable expectation of privacy with them.
Imagine the embarrassment when "no two fingerprints are alike" is finally disproven as some poor bastard is arrested and charged with a crime committed by another person solely on the basis of his thumbprint.
It doesn't seem to embarrass prosecutors too much when they jail someone for five months based on "conclusive DNA evidence" - even though the suspect was in hospital with a blood alcohol reading on 0.4 from two hours before the crime to 12 hours afterwards. And who'd been take to hospital by the same ambulance crew that attended the crime later on and moved the victim… You can see where this is going right? - "The paramedics physically moved both Anderson and Kumra, resulting in the inadvertent DNA transfer…"
How on earth can someone end up in jail for five months under those circumstances?
(Note too, the other suspect jailed for seven months - for, several months before the killing, posting a photo of the future-victim's house to Instagram…)
Not quite charged, but held for two weeks and only released when someone without an alibi of being on the other side of the planet was found to also have matching prints...
When you hear diplomats and intelligence types on radio interviews, as I have in the past week, talking of never having sensitive conversations in private homes or hotel rooms, but instead going outdoors where audio surveillance is difficult, the whole "expectation of privacy" gets turned on its head.
The law may not recognize this (though I suspect that's a tad fuzzy). Spycraft most certainly does.
