A few years ago I was living in San Diego county and thought my car was stolen. Called the police and when the officer showed up he said “let me put your plates into our system to see if any of our license plate readers picked it up”<p>I asked him where the readers were, thinking there were maybe a handful around the county. He responded by saying “oh they’re everywhere, if your car went half a mile from your house we will have it scanned”. He did all this directly in his patrol car without any sort of obvious oversight. When I glanced at the screen it showed EVERYWHERE I had driven in the past month.<p>It was quite shocking from a privacy perspective to realize this
as an American, it was fairly shocking to realize that San Diego County was embracing "track all vehicles at all times, linked to registration".. these are long-lived records? I realize that active duty military have basically already agreed to this, and others like that might not object. But every vehicle? Is that part of a "police state" by definition? unsettling
I'd like to know where companies like <a href="https://www.hawkanalytics.com/cellhawk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hawkanalytics.com/cellhawk/</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Reveal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Reveal</a> get location data on US citizens legally without the permission of those citizens, and how them buying such info isn't illegal surveillance, and how reselling the data to law enforcement is not selling stolen property for them, and receiving stolen property for the fuzz (assuming, maybe wrongly so, that I own my location data as PII)