There&#x27;s several things to worry about:<p>1. ALPR, when positioned strategically, can be as effective (if not more so) than GPS. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that police need a court order to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect&#x27;s car, but no such order is needed for ALPR. They&#x27;re also passive, so there&#x27;s no way to detect them, and you can&#x27;t really avoid them when driving. They can also be combined with stationary cameras to increase the surveillance area.<p>2. The mobile phone data of a carrier is only searchable with a warrant. Some agencies use Stingrays without a warrant (thanks, Baltimore City, for the heads up) to track people illegally, but they would need many deployed throughout an area to triangulate, and they wouldn&#x27;t be as accurate.<p>3. You can turn a phone off, but you can&#x27;t make a car invisible. (You could change the plates, but 99.99999999% of the citizens being tracked have no reason, nor access, to do this)<p>4. Access to the data is basically unrestricted to the police force, and they can keep it for a long time, and they have no oversight. The ACLU says that in 45 states there are no laws on how long police can keep the records.<p>5. They can be abused easily:<p><i>&quot;In 1998, a Washington D.C. police lieutenant pleaded guilty to extortion after blackmailing the owners of vehicles parked near a gay bar.[45] In 2015, the Los Angeles Police Department proposed sending letters to the home addresses of all vehicles that enter areas of high prostitution.[46][47][48]&quot;</i> [1] In NYC, they used it to track people who went to a mosque in Queens, amongst other places. [2]<p>What&#x27;s funny is that private companies have been operating ANPR units for years, and have private databases you can pay to search, similar to other data-selling companies that people like private investigators and creditors have been using for the past 15 years.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Automatic_number_plate_recognition#United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Automatic_number_plate_recogni...</a> [2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ap.org&#x2F;Content&#x2F;AP-In-The-News&#x2F;2012&#x2F;Newark-mayor-seeks-probe-of-NYPD-Muslim-spying" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ap.org&#x2F;Content&#x2F;AP-In-The-News&#x2F;2012&#x2F;Newark-mayor-s...</a>