[jumby]

ALPR is not manual or sustained. It's a one-time photo of a vehicle at a specific location & time.

The DPPA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...] already restricts who has the ability to convert from plate to actual personal information.

[jstarfish]

ALPR vans endlessly trawl public and private parking lots and streets, recording your presence and movements and just waiting for you to show up in their database with an unpaid parking ticket so they can boot or tow your car.

Some of the higher-tier services use ALPR cameras that map plates to GPS coordinates. Property ownership is public information so you can narrow down the owner of a vehicle's plate based on where they're parked overnight. You can deduce where the owner works by tracking where it's parked between 9 and 6. You can deduce who the owner's associates are by tracking who he tends to park near when not at home or work.

The beauty of it is how well it scales. One van can patrol your neighborhood. Another can patrol the mall. Another can drive around and through your office park. Another might catch you simply driving down the road. It's like having spies everywhere, and they're all feeding their observations back to a central database to build a broader profile...which they later sell to law enforcement upon request.

(Or you can make like Vincent Asaro and just give a cop buddy the plate number of the car that cut you off and have your post-roadrage firebomb run expedited. DPPA sure helped that guy!)

If that's not sustained surveillance then please explain your understanding of the concept.

[kevin_thibedeau]

DPPA is toothless. NY residents get billed for toll violations on privately owned Ontario highways. That doesn't happen without the state handing over personal info on US citizens to a foreign company.