There is at least one company that works with repo men - they put ANPR cameras on the repo men's dashboards, it records every plate that comes into view and uploads it in near real-time to a central databases along with gps info. Any repo man who subscribes to the service can put out an alert for a plate, once that plate of interest shows up in the central database they get a text message telling then when and where it was scanned. When I first heard about these guys a few years ago they already had a very large number of repomen participating in the service.
I am not surprised to hear that the companies have expanded their market beyond repomen, that is the nature of databases - once you've got the data centralized all kinds of ideas come up for how to exploit it.
Yes, in the US, the current state of the law is that anything done in public is fair game for anyone - there is no expectation of privacy when in public.
However, this point of law was determined back in the late 60's or early 70's, back when the concept of an indexed database of millions of permanent records of essentially everybody in public was barely even the stuff of science fiction, much less everyday fact. I think we are long overdue for a revaluation of the legal situation given the drastic change in circumstances of the last 40 years.
There is at least one company that works with repo men - they put ANPR cameras on the repo men's dashboards, it records every plate that comes into view and uploads it in near real-time to a central databases along with gps info. Any repo man who subscribes to the service can put out an alert for a plate, once that plate of interest shows up in the central database they get a text message telling then when and where it was scanned. When I first heard about these guys a few years ago they already had a very large number of repomen participating in the service.
I am not surprised to hear that the companies have expanded their market beyond repomen, that is the nature of databases - once you've got the data centralized all kinds of ideas come up for how to exploit it.