When capturing and storing technology are so cheap, it is tempting for Gov to store everything. In this case, car plate images.
I guess car rental business has another marketing theme to explore! Soon we will see computer rental and mobile phone rental. When trust is gone, people are willing to try extreme measures.
There is a book offers a critical review on the abundance of surveillance technology.
Critical Issues in Crime and Society : Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity.
New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers University PressÂ
You are being tracked. How license plate readers are being used to record Americans’ movements (ACLU, July 2013) – A little noticed surveillance technology, designed to track the movements of every passing driver, is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers, mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, use small, high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute. The information captured by the readers – including the license plate number, and the date, time, and location of every scan – is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/dhs-cancels-national-license-plate-tracking-plan/2014/02/19/a4c3ef2e-99b4-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html