To the contrary, cameras have been able to automatically read license plates since the 70s, and the technology became cheaper and more widely deployed in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...

At the end of the day, a camera in public can only record images of people in public. That does not and never did require a warrant.

One of the things that is really interesting to me is when people don't update their opinions of some thing when the level of difficulty and cost associated with that thing change. A few decades ago, if a police officer wanted to find the whereabouts of some individual, they would have to do some serious leg work, even with ALPRs, potentially watch many hours of videos, etc.

With Flock that can be reduced to a mere search query across many locales (maybe not even their locale!) with effectively no effort spent.

When the cost changes so dramatically it effectively changes the balance of power and that is something we should, at the very least, deeply consider.

> A few decades ago, if a police officer wanted to find the whereabouts of some individual, they would have to do some serious leg work, even with ALPRs, potentially watch many hours of videos, etc.

The whole point about ALPRs is that the license plate reading is automatic. Even during the 90s, all a police officer had to do was query a database.

In the US, up until the mid to late 2000s, the majority of ALPRs were mounted on the police cruisers. Even when they moved on to installing them in fixed locations, they had two major limitations:

• There were few of them

• The databases were managed by the jurisdiction

To my exact point, by increasing the number of readers and SaaS-ifying the process to enable jurisdictions to opt-in to information sharing, you have meaningfully changed what the technology is capable of and how it can be used.

Motorola built the first national ALPR database in the mid 2000s. Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.

You keep ignoring my only point.

> Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.

Scale and level of effort involved matter. How many cameras were reporting to the Motorola database in 2000? 2010? Flock today?

How easy was it to type in “white Chevrolet Tahoe at [intersection]” until you see the one you want, get its license plate and run through the rest of the database?

Who was able to do that? How easy was it?

The sum of many small changes can create a meaningfully different result that we need to evaluate different than the thing that came before.

It is, and always was as straightforward as typing in the license plate number. Do you think indexing a bunch of 7vcharacter strings was beyond the capability of databases in the 2000s?