The real problem with this sort of thing is that there’s no legal way to avoid it. If you’re operating a motor vehicle on public roads, you need to have a plate visible. You can’t obscure it.

The laws requiring that visibility were made in an era where it wasn’t possible for someone like Flock to enable anyone who can aim a camera at a road to mass-log and aggregate and data-mine the movement it provides.

The only real technical solution would be to back out the laws requiring license plates to be visible (and it wouldn’t be perfect, since Flock will still look for identifying oddities on a vehicle and try to log that too, like collision damage). But if you do that, then you lose an important tool for dealing with motor vehicle theft and finding vehicles involved in crimes.

And there aren’t restrictions on selling or doing whatever companies want with the data. Or with data that they get from facial recognition/gait data in the future, or that sort of thing.