#AND NOW IT FOLLOWS ME EVERYDAY LICENSE#

So if you want to go to your therapist or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or to church, all your movements can be tracked. In most parts of the United States, you cannot get anywhere without driving a car.

That information can be abused in a number of ways. Photo: Something OriginalД«ut what could anyone really do with that information that would hurt us?

#AND NOW IT FOLLOWS ME EVERYDAY LICENSE#

Allowing the government to collect massive quantities of information about everyone opens the door to abuse.ДЄ City of Alexandria police car equipped with mobile automatic license plate readers. You end up with what is essentially a massive tracking database that gathers information about innocent people. The problem is when law enforcement agents then engage in the mass retention of all the plate data the readers collect - whether or not it pertains to people who may be involved in wrongdoing. ItвЂ™s good for the police to be able to automatically tell when a car goes by whether itвЂ™s been stolen, for example. That plate number can be checked against a hot list of cars - for instance, cars associated with someone whoвЂ™s wanted for a crime. The license plate reader takes pictures of every passing car, stores the photographs, and converts the plates into machine-readable text to extract the license plate numbers. People often donвЂ™t realize that if you drive a car in the United States, youвЂ™re most likely being tracked by license plate readers, and that photographs of you are being taken and stored on a regular basis. At the moment, many people donвЂ™t understand this technology, its ubiquity and how itвЂ™s being used. But I donвЂ™t think people realize that local police departments often have very powerful mass surveillance technology as well, and I wanted to be able to focus attention on that. I think it is commonly understood now that the National Security Agency is engaged in the mass surveillance of entire populations.

You are a civil libertiesВ lawyer with many different strands to your work, but in the talk you gave at TEDGlobal, you focused on automatic license plate reader technology. (Watch theВ talk, вЂњ The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you.вЂќ)Д¬rump tells the TED Blog more about her work, and the technologies that are quietly threatening the privacy and civil liberties of innocent people. Did you know that across the United States, cameras are automatically taking pictures of your carвЂ™s license plate as you driveВ by, recording your plate number and your locations over time? In a chilling talk given at TEDGlobal 2014, civil liberties lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump called attention to the ubiquity of mass surveillance technology currently being deployed without public awareness, laws governing its use or privacy policies regulating what happens to the data being collected.

And now it follows me everyday