From NPR's All Things Considered
'Insecurity Cameras' To Track All Of Town's Traffic
By David Gorn
A little town in California has a big and controversial idea: It wants to install security cameras on roads leading into town so that it can screen and record every license plate that comes inside city limits. The plan could effectively turn Tiburon into perhaps the nation's first public gated community....
Police run license-plate checks all the time, says Jennifer King, an expert in technology and public policy [and School of Information doctoral student] at the University of California, Berkeley. Tiburon's plan is to just run many plate checks. The problem, she says, is that once the equipment is installed, safeguards to protect privacy can change. For instance, the license plate information is supposed to be purged after eight hours, but what if a crime occurs and suddenly that information becomes more important? ...