Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle
Key takeaways
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- 404media published a report on Tuesday detailing plans to equip schoolhouses with automatic license plate readers and turn the data over to law enforcement.
- As noted by Reason, stop-arm cameras have been criticized for not delivering promised safety benefits, but they ve nonetheless generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the companies that deploy them.
Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday.
Just last week, we published a story about how companies that maintain automatic license plate readers—and profit from selling the data they collect—are also looking to track electronic signatures from connected devices and even your car s infotainment hardware with a new product straightforwardly named Signal Trace. And they re not stopping there.
404media published a report on Tuesday detailing plans to equip schoolhouses with automatic license plate readers and turn the data over to law enforcement. The report is based on leaked documents from BusPatrol, a company that specializes in stop-arm cameras that capture images of drivers illegally passing school buses ( stop-arm is the proper name of the fold-out stop signs on school buses). The company claims to have over 40,000 of these cameras deployed across 24 states, and at least 30 states permit them. They use AI software to automatically review images and submit them to law enforcement.