alt Hacker NewsThey're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
Replies
> It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker
This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past.
> The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events; > The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often;
> Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2]
Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced.
Notes:
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_... Prior to passage, a slang term for running/looking up the plate/registration of a car with a pretty woman driver was "running a date".
1 - https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-rea...
2 - https://www.aclum.org/publications/what-you-need-know-about-...
3 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/646bcc8a-219b-47d8-b5cd-72624...
4 - https://www.aamva.org/getmedia/0063bf88-cb44-4ab9-90b6-200c8...
5 - https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/scotchlite-reflective-material-u...
Disclaimers:
I used to work for my state's motor vehicle department and had database/developer access to driving licenses and motor vehicle registration records.
I graduated from a police academy when I was a youngster.*
Further reading:
AP: Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...