I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...

I've seen this done before by journalists requesting license plate reader data but it's another nail in the coffin of anonymity. Dare I say unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no escape. In television I've seen talk about masks and garments that help prevent this, but I think it's a zero sum game. You will be tracked. You will be photographed, profiled, analyzed and that data is likely sold to the highest bidder and it's only accelerating.

"You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a system you asked for, to keep you safe. A machine that spies on you every hour of every day. You've granted it the power to see everything, to index, order and control the lives of ordinary people. The government considers these people irrelevant. We don't. But to it, you are all irrelevant. Victim or perpetrator, if you stand in its way, we'll find you."

Person of Interest continues to be prescient.

Feels like it's also going to be handy for selective prosecution. Say you're targeted for public speech someone doesn't like. Now they can try and draw some link between your travels and some unsolved crime. Even if it's a weak link, and they can't win in court...the bar for arrest is pretty low.

And, a bit of a reach, but it's also some of the foundation for "pre-crime" type stuff. "You've exhibited patterns of comings and goings that suggest..."

I'm more pessimistic. With available AI you can take video of someone, extract that human profile and characteristics, and then insert it into another one. It only takes that one visit to your office "We have video of you sneaking into an elementary school bathroom" to totally ruin your life, and even if you could prove it wasn't you and was doctored, the damage is still done. It's worse than selective prosecution

Person of Interest was such a great TV show! Too bad many of the things in there came out to be true, or very close to true, in just a matter of 10-15 years.

Ah, hadn't seen it. I was thinking Minority Report, but skimming Person of Interest summaries..yes, similar.

> unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no escape

If you’re driving a car, yes. As we saw with Mangione’s escape, if you’re on public transit you’re much more anonymous. (Given the public risks inherent to driving, I think this is a fair trade—off.)

> Dare I say unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no escape.

Lol. Nobody will be able to track me as the guy crab-walking in a sumo suit wearing the Unabomber disguise.

I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but the fact you would be wthe guy " crab-walking in a sumo suit wearing the Unabomber disguise" is probably going to draw even more attention. Like the tesla vandals. The cameras will simply follow you back to your car, home, business, wherever you went to take off that costume, then really zero in on you because you went and did what the police might term as "weird."

A recent event in midtown manhattan shows it’s pretty easy to evade surveillance if you can avoid using a car for a brief period of time.

Didn’t he get away on a bike into a park?

In that case the police had a Starbucks register photo with a face, but that kind of slip can also be easily avoided

I believe the parent poster was suggesting this as a joke. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1105/

I have bad news for you. The data is not only being sold to the highest bidder, much of it is being sold repeatedly to just about any bidder.

I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of responsibility, so you should be scrutinized when you do it.

That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.

It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.

Public surveillance should come with certain guarantees, though. Like being transparent about what data is collected and how/where it's stored. And purging the data after a fixed time unless it's involved in a case.

I'm all for automated traffic law enforcement via camera, but I think it's very reasonable to say that if the camera doesn't detect a violation of the law, the data needs to be deleted not warehoused.

> When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.

I don’t think there’s privacy in the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card world either.

I think that's more of a technicality of billing you for a service than something by design

("the tap on - tap off Oyster/Presto card " => Google sent me to "List of public transport smart cards" so I assume you're refering to some branded public transit system)

Data retention time matters though. One thing if it is one week, another if it is one century.

There has never been an expectation of privacy in public.

It talks about Flock branded surveillance in several places, then the news site itself asks for donations with this tagline "Thanks for joining our flock!". Short double-take on that donation area for me.

They call it out in the text:

> Ninety uneventful minutes later, I pulled into Roanoke to go to the Cardinal office and visit my Roanoke members of our own Cardinal team — which, in an unintentional irony in this story, we refer to as The Flock.

Feel free to deflock Flock.

https://deflock.me/

I fell arse over tit at a London tube station and requested the CCTV footage under the GDPR. Got a lovely full colour DVD of me stacking it.

Don't FOIA requests charge you for the manhours it took, or is it just the data transfer cost? It might vary by state now that I think of it. I wonder how much these cost.

Saying these requests constitutes a felony is ludicrous, hopefully the judge sees the case as a bad prank.

FOIA is federal. States have their own public records programs.

https://www.eff.org/issues/transparency/foia-how-to

Let me guess: get the police to pay for them and sell the data to advertisers.