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Plate Readers Abound in DC Area, With Little Regard For Privacy
schwit1 writes "More than 250 cameras in Washington D.C. and its suburbs scan license plates in real time. It's a program that's quietly expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago. Some jurisdictions store the information in a large networked database; others retain it only in the memory of each individual reader's computer, then delete it after several weeks as new data overwrite it. A George Mason University study last year found that 37 percent of large police agencies in the United States now use license plate reader technology and that a significant number of other agencies planned to have it by the end of 2011. But the survey found that fewer than 30 percent of the agencies using the tool had researched any legal implications. With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles."
Actually, it does. When the opportunity cost of collecting and analyzing data is high, it doesn't really matter whether it's being collected. When anybody can turn around and do data mining on it with trivial ease, it becomes quite important. Nobody cared about social security numbers being printed in recorded court documents until they became available online, and people didn't become *neurotic* about retroactively redacting them until thirdparties started scraping, OCR'ing, and data-mining those same documents.
What I want to know is why, to this day, it's still legal for municipalities in Florida to sell liens, then record literally a semi-truck of liens recorded against "John Doe" at the courthouse ~2 years later, instead of being required to electronically associate those same liens with the property's globally-unique folio number, so somebody who goes to BUY the property can conveniently find them all in 12 seconds. Instead, cities like Miami can shrug and say, "We sold a lien to somebody 3 years ago, but we didn't keep track of who we sold it to, and we filed it with 300,000 other liens on the same day at the courthouse under "John Doe", so you're just going to have to wait 4 years until the person officially redeems it, or literally spend 3 months looking for a needle in a haystack one record at a time until you manage to trip over it. Assuming we didn't make a typo." It's positively *insane* how easy it is for municipalities in Florida to pile on fines without making even the most trivial effort to notify property owners, and record liens that could end with a property being sold for literally pennies on the thousand-dollar with breathtaking recklessness that seems almost inconceivable. You read in papers about how careless mortgage companies were with paperwork (their excuse for just making up replacement paperwork with robo-signers as they go along), but it's *nothing* compared to how simultaneously careless Florida municipalities are allowed to be, and how ruthless they're allowed to be in spite of their carelessness.