alt Hacker NewsThe original sin is requiring cars to display an identifying plate. Imagine asking the framers about a similar ID display on horseback mounted travelers.
That's the underlying rights violation-- and it's why solutions that otherwise try to restrict ALPR run into oddities about limiting people's ability to observe what is plainly visible in public.
Failing that avenue, we should treat most broad involuntary data collection efforts as a form of stalking/harassment, and treat it accordingly-- including providing a strong civil path for anyone whose data was collected without their knoweldge especially given that law enforcement / prosecutors have a material conflict of interest which will prevent them from enforcing the law.
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>Imagine asking the framers about a similar ID display on horseback mounted travelers.
It existed for ships and the law passed while George Washington was still president. Ships had to be registered and it was required for the ship's name to be legibly written on the stern.
I agree with the idea that license plates are the biggest part of the problem and that they've had a huge kind of scope creep in terms of what they're used for.
Whenever I've thought about this problem, the challenge with a more high-tech and privacy-friendly alternative is the intuition that it's good if witnesses to a crime or accident can memorize or write down the plate of an involved vehicle in order to make that specific vehicle identifiable. If the vehicles were providing only a cryptographic identity that wasn't memorable or that required special equipment to query, we would lose the "the robbers got away in a car with this plate" or "the pedestrian was run over by a car with this plate" scenario, which feels like a surprising cost somehow.
If it weren't for that, it might be feasible to use some more modern cryptographic approach to ensure that cars are licensed or insured without also making it easy in general to track them or people's activities or whereabouts. But allowing the public to quickly see any car's identity with their eyes and memorize it with their minds is quite a harsh constraint.