"Of five cars that I looked up, three cars turned up nothing, but I found data on the other two.
"One car had a single sighting: it was parked on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at 12:40 in the morning last December."
This squares with my use of databases sold to lawyers, doing look-ups on myself and close family members. The databases are much less impressive in their power than salesmen suggest. I'm not worried about this. I won't be worried about this, and eventually when most cars are self-driving and many cars are paid for by the use and ridden by many different passengers, license plate recognition will be less informative than ever.
To be sure, aggregating a whole lot of data can add up in its impact. MIT has developed a tool with which you can analyze all of your own Gmail metadata
(I learned about this from a submission to HN from ColinWright, which alas received little discussion here), and I found out from that tool that my use of email is more business-related than I realized: all of the top seven "collaborators" (that program's term) that I have are actual work colleagues, as well as personal friends. A megabyte here, a megabyte there, and pretty soon all the data turn into information. But really the victims here often enough will be the chump clients who pay for license plate record searches and don't find out anything worthwhile.
eventually when most cars are self-driving and many cars are paid for by the use and ridden by many different passengers, license plate recognition will be less informative than ever
Except that then they'll have credit cards matched to continuous GPS data.
"I won't be worried about this, and eventually when most cars are self-driving and many cars are paid for by the use and ridden by many different passengers, license plate recognition will be less informative than ever."
Just pair it with cell phone meta-data, and you'll know exactly who's inside each vehicle.
"One car had a single sighting: it was parked on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at 12:40 in the morning last December."
This squares with my use of databases sold to lawyers, doing look-ups on myself and close family members. The databases are much less impressive in their power than salesmen suggest. I'm not worried about this. I won't be worried about this, and eventually when most cars are self-driving and many cars are paid for by the use and ridden by many different passengers, license plate recognition will be less informative than ever.
To be sure, aggregating a whole lot of data can add up in its impact. MIT has developed a tool with which you can analyze all of your own Gmail metadata
https://immersion.media.mit.edu/
(I learned about this from a submission to HN from ColinWright, which alas received little discussion here), and I found out from that tool that my use of email is more business-related than I realized: all of the top seven "collaborators" (that program's term) that I have are actual work colleagues, as well as personal friends. A megabyte here, a megabyte there, and pretty soon all the data turn into information. But really the victims here often enough will be the chump clients who pay for license plate record searches and don't find out anything worthwhile.