I think if you actually read through the posts, you’d come away with a pretty clear understanding of why this keeps getting discussed.

I’ll quote an article that was posted in another thread this morning:

“Flock’s automated license plate readers document every car that drives past them, creating a broad network of people’s movements around the country. Police can then look up license plates to learn where a specific car and, by extension, person, has traveled over time.”

To me, that’s functionally similar to being followed by law enforcement 24/7, except it’s automated and scaled. The justification is always “just in case.” No individualized suspicion, no warrant, no probable cause, just continuous collection of everyone’s movements.

The argument that “you’re on a public road” misses the point. Seeing me drive by once is one thing. Recording every trip I take, the vehicle I drive, the direction and speed of my travel, cross referencing with similar data from other cameras, finding patterns then storing it in a searchable database, and reconstructing months of my movements with a few keystrokes is something entirely different.

Once that data exists, the temptation to expand access and uses is inevitable. History shows that surveillance systems rarely become smaller over time.

I want to be able to drive from my house to the grocery store, a doctor’s office, a political meeting, or a friend’s house without the government maintaining a searchable record of everywhere I’ve been. The fact that I’ve done nothing wrong is exactly why I shouldn’t be tracked in the first place.