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> I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police.

You can. Just not in a car, because cars have license plates so not only can police identify you, anyone who can lookup a plate can. It’s non-anonymous almost by definition.

Where I live the registry is public so if I want I can ask for the owner of a license plate from the relevant authority.




But I think one of the things we see with technology and privacy is that there’s a real difference between things that you can do, but they require manual human action and are therefor costly, and things that are done effortlessly and constantly. We’ve always had license plates, but we haven’t always had a government record of where every car has travelled. We will soon, I’m sure.

And right now it’s true you can mostly walk or bike around in public without being tracked, but that’s just until we get the facial recognition really going. Then the argument will be that you were always showing your face in public and it was always possible that someone would recognize you so this is no different. But of course it will be different.

And now it’s possible, if you have a conversation in a cafe, that someone will overhear you. But if every conversation were being recorded, transcribed, and transmitted to the authorities, that wouldn’t be the same thing at all.


We get this problem all the time. The registry of cars was “public” so anyone could call and ask for the details or a car (e.g whether it had debt or parking fines or whether the guy trying to sell it was actually the owner). Then with the arrival of the internet, should this information be available at everyone’s fingertips? Should it be possible to web search it or was the phone call a good “rate limiter” and prevented abuse? It was actually decided it was, and it’s now call/text only. The discussion about everything being logged is why I like the GDPR. It’s the long term mass gathering of data that should be addressed.




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