Coming home on Rt. 7 west of Leesburg today I passed a black tiny eccono-car with license plate readers on both corners of the rear roof.  A lady was inside with a laptop on a car stand.  She was obviously not a cop.  What gives with that?

Private industry collecting data for repo-man.

It REALLY creeps me out that the cops automatically read my license plate; even more so that some large lady in a sub-compact nissan is doing it.

Very creepy.

Private data-collection services are raking it in.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2015/01/private_companies_know_where_youve_been_thanks_to_license_plate_cameras.html

Creepy, yes but...there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.

Just like when you place your trash cans out at the curb, they're pretty much free game.

The cops doing it should freak you out more, given that they actually have access to all of the DMV data behind it. Private companies don't. They can only match plates to what their "customers" (lenders, collection people, tow companies) provide them, which you provided to the customer via your transaction. Or in the case of tow companies, they just look for patterns to identify people who repeatedly park in "visitor" spaces and such.

This phenomenon is all part of "big data."  (search that on DuckDuckGo.com).

However, there is a frightening dimension when .gov pays for this data:  

.gov may be restrained by the Constitution and BOR, but Big Data is not so constrained.  Ergo, there is no "fruit of the poisonous tree" - nor any remedy when used against you - if the collection was done privately.    

Moreover, license plates are technically government property.  In addition, you have little to no expectation of privacy on a public roadway anyway - and there is NO expectation of privacy extending to your government-owned license plate (in fact, you are legally obligated to display it in public).

Sort of how we, as a country, never violated the rule against negociating with terrorist in the Bergdahl case; we spoke to Qatar and THEY were the ones who tecnically did the speaking to the Taliban; problem solved!

My HOA frowns on me parking my car in my house!

This.

And even then, since there's no suspicion necessary (as in, no expectation of privacy to your license plate and the information in the DMV server that's attached to it) to check the registration information on the plate, there's really nothing to complain about. There's no substantive difference between the readers, and a police officer manually running every plate he sees.

I'm not saying I agree with it, but until the information is restricted and requires some suspicion to access, this is what we'll have to deal with.

I'd suggest some similar requirements as exist for accessing a person's criminal history information: justification that it is part of an active investigation (even into a traffic offense, for plate info).

Coincidenlty I saw her on 66 this morning.  Looked like someone's grandmother, was going speedlimit in the right lane.
Nissan black Versa, Harley Davison owners group special plate, IIRc..  


 

This needs legislation.

This sort of data collection is a form of stalking and harassment.

Yes, if I'm walking on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, you can take my picture, and there is not much I can say about it.

But, if you:

• follow me everywhere I go; and


• you record my location in a database; and


• you sell (or give) the data to the whole world; and


• I have no clear recourse for restricting who gets such information about my personal activities

You endanger me (or place me in fear) every bit as much as if you constantly followed me at a distance of 50 yards with a baseball bat.

Makes it way to easy for bad people to do bad things to me.

A large component of my personal safety program is that others don't easily know the particulars of my comings and goings.
When you take that away from me, you have taken something very valuable.

Fight this.

I agree... I don't like this, and neither should the.gov, considering the large numbers of LE, Intelligence Officers, and .mil people around here who are advised to vary their routines/routes.  What assurance do we have that one of that private company's customers is not an AQ front group?

I agree!  Collecting all this information on American citizens under the guise that it is for our own protection just lowers the threshold for abuse by an oppressive government or even individual government employees with axes to grind or other personal or political agendas.  The IRS scandal is just one real example of how an out of control bureaucracy can persecute American citizens based on their political beliefs.  Even if we are to believe that this was just a few "rogue employees" from Cleveland, it is illustrative of the power that even low level bureaucrats now have over our lives.  The more information they government knows about you, the easier it is to persecute
you based on your political beliefs, religious beliefs, sexual
preference, associations, etc., etc., etc.  Unfortunately, when the
government decides it wants to persecute you, you have very little
recourse to stop it.  





When the NSA data collection program broke, I remember seeing stories about how individual employees were accessing the phone records and other materials about ex boyfriends/girlfriends and other people they had no business accessing information on.  I can see the same type of abuse occurring with the license plate reader data and any other data the government holds on its citizens.  Why empower these people further by surrendering more of your privacy to the government?





 

Cops are civilians. You know, subject to regular law, not the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Lest we forget and all that...

Some states sell the DMV data to private industry, who then allow customers to access it. Yeah there is an app for that. Punch in name or plate number, poof a geo-map displays where car has been. Only a matter of time before a road rager is waiting for you at home, or gang members use it to locate undercover cops, etc.

Solution: IR LEDs.  

B*stards!

People would lose their shit if they ever saw a demo of Lexis SmartLinx, which has been around for a decade.

Solution: None

http://www.lexisnexis.com/government/solutions/literature/smartlinx.pdf

Does not appear to include history of personal movement.

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I used to work for a repo company here in NoVa. The above poster is correct we only had access to a (small) portion of the available data dealing obviously with repo's. On the other hand I have no idea what the other 10-12  company's we sold the info to were doing with it.
Pretty scary sh*t.

Would you get a "tip", a la Dog the Bounty Hunter, and have to go on stakeouts at the dudes house/work?

Same or similar car was in the Spotsylvania Courthouse area on a small side-street about a week ago.

Hide yo plates.

If practical,  make it blatantly obvious that you are photographing the vehicle and operator.  Maybe they should have concerns for their privacy,  too.

No tip, you know when you fill out a credit app. they sometimes ask for non related "references"? Yeah those are the second place we go if your not stupid enough to leave it in front of your own address.
I actually pulled the majority of cars from the persons place of employment. Facebook made the Repo industry pretty easy.

If Satan and social media had a baby, it would be Facebook.  It doesn't surprise me it made your life easier.

Amen, people really need to consider what they post. The whole world can see it, especially the people you would prefer not to see it.

I've seen them a couple of times in Charlottesville. Twice it was a maroon Ford Focus with Maryland plates.

The second time I took a photo of them - so if anyone is interested, license plate 1-4713 stopped and got lunch at the McDonald's on McIntire Avenue in Charlottesville, VA at 12:49pm on November 5, 2014. They then turned in to the parking lot to the right of the exit to eat.

C-ville is a long way from Maryland.... wonder if they're evading personal property tax.

Well, geographically it's a long way from Maryland, yes...