I don't know if you could ever collect this data and never have foreign entities or NSA moles infiltrate into it by sending their agents to work at that company and steal the data whenever they want. But I can see how this would be good at fighting crime but also a completely and absolute destruction of privacy.

We need politicians that actually care about Americans and their rights but no one who cares is dumb enough to want to go into politics, which is the sad thing.

And then of course all the texas plates. No, it isn't just visitors from texas. Texas has a cool loophole where there is no registration information on the plate, it is on a little sticker on the dashboard. As such, there are a dozen plus cars that have been regulars in my neighborhood for years with texas plates, with some several years old sticker on their dashboard.

It is kind of surprising that they don't get hit with a huge ticket for failing to register their car after 20 days. Some even park on the street quite brazenly. But maybe that shows how these systems are, today at least, very poorly connected between states. I've even seen a car being sold locally where the owner openly admits it was never registered or smogged, and they used it as their local neighborhood runabout just rolling the dice that they would not get pulled over. Just an aspect of the driving culture.

Police can still use them to identify the vehicle, and verify registration, but mass surveillance and repo companies can't use them to track vehicles for more than a day OR to identify vehicles.

The only solution I see is to stop massive data collection no matter who does it. This is probably not going to happen so we will most likely end up with a surveillance society much worse than what "1984" described. And some day an authoritarian will use the data to its full extent.

Seriously, though, I think the Karens out there want E-bike licensed just so cops can keep hassling brown people even when they're not driving clapped out old Toyotas.

https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/collection-and-m... (dutch, sorry)

https://anprcameras.nl/ (a partial list, oh and there's mobile "stations" doing it too)

At one point they were very proud of having developed an algorithm to go much further than just license plate reading: "trajectory control". By placing ANPR cameras on every road and checking the traffic, they could not just detect when your license plate drove by a camera, but locate the vehicle down to a few meters at all times. This algorithm is now also used for traffic indicators, speeding fines, ...

They also identify the vehicle (to check if you've paid correctly, and to give fines relating to vehicle type). They check how many people are in the car (there's a tax advantage for cars that never carry more than 2 people). And I'm sure this is not a full list.

Oh and in case you're wondering about the GPDR: every EU state, as well as a looong list of international organizations (from the UK tax service to Interpol) have the right to grant permanent and transitive exceptions to the GPDR to anyone they want. The license plates are collected and processed by a private company. A blanket GPDR exception has been granted to them. They have other business deals involving the license plate data.

The Netherlands is also doing face recognition in the public space, by the way. In a very similar way. The very thing the GPDR was explicitly "created to prevent", or so the story goes. It was even put into the GPDR law that without the GPDR face recognition would become commonplace. Well, GPDR passed, and it is commonplace. At airports + a lot of train stations + a number of locations in big cities. About 1.3% of all arrests in the Netherlands were made on the basis of face recognition cameras in 2023.

https://algoritmes.overheid.nl/en/algoritme/oorg10264/354332...

If you don't like mass surveillance, you have to ban private companies doing it too. If you're okay with it, do it in-house. You still need to ban private companies doing it.