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aftbittoday at 1:38 AM2 repliesview on HN

What was your answer then?


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akerl_today at 2:38 AM

To spare you the search of his comment history, my memory is that it's roughly: the stolen car databases have tons of cars listed that weren't actually stolen, or have already been recovered, so you end up pulling over a ton of unsuspecting people just driving around.

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tadfishertoday at 3:35 AM

One answer is that ALPRs have much too high an error rate (John Oliver claims it exceeds 30%) to rely on them for dragnet surveillance.

Maybe it makes sense to track specific vehicles, with safeguards such as warrants and also checking make/model/color, but it makes less sense to just give the government a 30-day rolling database of the public's movements in total, especially when 30% of those data points are inaccurate and thus not useful as evidence.

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