> PRIVATE COMPANIES are doing 75%+ of the tracking
My family recently went to an amusement park.
As we drove in, I saw what looked like a license plate reader camera on the inbound gate to the parking.
On the way out, we pull up to pay at the automated gate kiosk and my wife says: "Oh wow! How did they know how long we've been here??"
I answered: "Because they scanned our plate on the way in and now when we pulled into the exit gate"
Part of me thought this was cool (automation!), part of me thought "well, there is no expectation of privacy since we are in public" and part of me thought "this is very big brother but done by private companies"
I see absolutely nothing wrong or big-brother about such a system if the data stays on premises only until you leave (or maybe until the end of the day to give you in-and-out pricing privileges).
On the other hand, if the data is being sold to a data aggregator that is troubling. We see lots of surprising things like this, for example weather apps selling your location data.
This is why we need better data protection rights. GDPR has a lot of good ideas (though implementation was painful). CCPA should be strengthened.
Ideally we’d get a federal law limiting data collection without consent. (The optimist in me thinks this could be bipartisan.)
My family recently went to an amusement park.
As we drove in, I saw what looked like a license plate reader camera on the inbound gate to the parking.
On the way out, we pull up to pay at the automated gate kiosk and my wife says: "Oh wow! How did they know how long we've been here??"
I answered: "Because they scanned our plate on the way in and now when we pulled into the exit gate"
Part of me thought this was cool (automation!), part of me thought "well, there is no expectation of privacy since we are in public" and part of me thought "this is very big brother but done by private companies"