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https://n2v.almanacnews.com/square/print/2015/03/17/portola-valley-little-opposition-to-recording-license-plate-data

Town Square

Portola Valley: Little opposition to recording license plate data

Original post made on Mar 17, 2015

In the second of two forums to gauge community sentiment in Portola Valley on whether to mount license-plate reading cameras along Alpine, Portola and Arastradero roads, opinion tilted toward installing the cameras.

Read the full story here Web Link posted Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 8:09 AM

Comments

Posted by David B
a resident of Portola Valley: Central Portola Valley
on Mar 17, 2015 at 12:55 pm

I went to the meeting, and despite strong privacy leanings, came away with cautious support for this. I have a decent fear that "government" will find ways to overuse and misuse this data, and I don't trust their promises of security and audits. However, if my house were robbed or my children were endangered, I'd want the Sheriff to catch the bad guys as quickly as possible.

The basic functionality of this system (as we were assured) is to do a live lookup of a scanned license plate against a database of known plates of interest; if there's a "hit", local law enforcement is immediately notified that Plate XXX was just seen in Town Y. There doesn't (yet) seem to be any massive analysis or data mining of the data.

I hope they do it... and I hope we don't in 10 years regret that this opened a big privacy hole.

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