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July 25, 2006
Mass Market LPR - A Recipe for Regulation
From Wired News:
Andy Bucholz of G2 Tactics has suggested that mobile license plate reading (LPR) or ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) will go mainstream. (More background on G2 Tactics). He is of course hoping that he can mass market his company's technology. This lead him to make the following statements which appeared in Wired News:
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.
Not surprisingly, this hyperbole has resulted in a great deal of attention, such as a Slashdot article. I think this vision is unrealistic and really leads people to wonder why we don't have regulation. I think any steps towards wholesale use of smart cameras by insurance companies and data-tracking firms will lead to strong support for regulation relating to privacy and surveillance.
Posted by rshah at July 25, 2006 02:41 PM
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