Florida town keeps your license plate for a decade

I can't say I like this but at the same time I see no real expectation of privacy here. We live in a world where surveillance is the norm - and it's only gonna get worse. I can easily point a camera out my window and record everyone who walks past my house. It's only a matter of time before facial recognition services pop up that can ID people in real time (Google claims that they intentionally disabled facial recognition in Google Goggles because it works too well, but you can bet that someone out there will think differently and provide that service for a fee).

The vehicle owner information associated with a license plate may be considered private information but the plate itself isn't. This may be disturbing but the obvious slippery slope here is that eventually they'll apply this technique to facial recognition as well. Or maybe just recording faces and recognize them later, just store every face into a giant DB and expect that in the future the technology will catch up. To deal with this I think we may need to reconsider what is public and what we can record in public. Personally, I would prefer to allow everyone and anyone to record and store everything in public sight, but that also includes recording and storing police officers and other government workers without restrictions. I fully oppose laws that restrict citizens from recording/photographing police officers.
 
I thought I had the worse timing this morning when I turned off the street to take a short cut and was stopped by a train. It got worse when the detour I took to avoid construction sprouted a new construction crew as well. But all that got redeemed with this brilliant timing: Feds spending over $5.1M on facial recognition surveillance program

Wish my timing was the other way around!
 
Sad for the days of yore. Where one could make prank phone calls and have martial affairs without a simple database search to catch you.
 
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