“What if they come in through the back door or the bathroom window like that infamous Beatles song”? - A Scanner Darkly
Wired has the goods on automated licence plate readers:
In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists’ movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who’s on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology.
Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations.
It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.
Giant data-tracking firms such as ChoicePoint, Accurint and Acxiom already collect detailed personal and financial information on millions of Americans. Once they discover how lucrative it is to know where a person goes between the supermarket, for example, and the strip club, the LPR industry could explode, says Bucholz.
Private detectives would want the information. So would repo men or bail bondsmen. And the government, which often contracts out personal data collection — in part, so it doesn’t have to deal with Freedom of Information Act requests — might encourage it.
“I know it sounds really Big Brother,” Bucholz says. “But it’s going to happen. It’s going to get cheaper and cheaper until they slap them up on every taxicab and delivery truck and track where people live.” And work. And sleep. And move.
Privacy advocates worry that Bucholz, who wants to sell LPR data to consumer data brokers like ChoicePoint, knows what he’s talking about.
“We have pretty much a Wild West society when it comes to privacy rights,” says Jay Stanley, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The overall lesson here is that we really need to put in place some broad-based privacy laws. We need to establish basic ground rules for how these new capabilities are constrained.”
In other news, the NY Times reports; TiVo Is Watching When You Don’t Watch, and It Tattles.
Microsoft’s Massive Ad Server, Double Fusion and InGame Adverting can provide dynamically downloadable advertising targeted just to you. The surveillence society is now cost/effective. Even profitable.
Big Brother forgets that power corrupts…and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You don’t have to be Philip K. Dick to see where it’s going.
Interesting times. Just like the movies.
