When government is broke, everything is for sale. Even your information.
An advertising campaign in the UK began using automated number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras to identify passing vehicles and create personalized advertisements. The motor oil giant Castrol UK Limited yesterday activated a set of five electronic billboards in London that flash an image of the exact type of Castrol-brand motor oil appropriate for the nearest vehicle.
“The right oil for your car is: Castrol Magnatec 5W-30 A1,” the advertisement reads for eight seconds as a Jaguar with the license plate 1DFL drives past.
The roadside digital billboards, seventeen feet wide and eight feet high, are owned by Clear Channel Outdoor. Castrol’s campaign added the license scanning technology which ties into the official UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) database. The agency provides private registration information to just about any company willing to pay the desired fee.
They say that “the campaign” does not store any information about which vehicles pass where, but computers only forget in two ways:
1 – Destruction, or
2 – When someone tells them to do so (and even then, that’s iffy).
You’ll remember the brouhaha during “Cash for Clunkers” about certain PC’s becoming subject to government inspection/possible confiscation. And if you think that the TIA supporters at the DVLA won’t be asking for certain logs, I’ve got some government run health care to give you that won’t cost taxpayers a dime.