I assume every vehicle has been tracked for decades now. Remember when they simplified the design of license plates to make them easier for cameras to read? Why they feel the need to hide it though.

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mytailorisrich 5 hours ago | parent [-]

In the UK: "A record for all vehicles passing by a camera is stored, including those for vehicles that are not known to be of interest at the time of the read. At present ANPR cameras nationally, submit on average around 60 million ANPR ‘read’ records to national ANPR systems daily." [1] (ANPR = Automatic Number Plate Recognition)

The data is kept for 12 months. So basically if you get onto the police radar for whatever reason they can roughly see how you used your car, and others they know you had access to, in the last 12 months (just saying, hum, hum).

[1] https://www.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-...

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gambiting 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So I'll say two things to that:

1) If your car is stolen, suddenly none of this capability exists, or is inaccessible to police for some reason. No one can actually just type in your reg and see where it was last seen, seemingly, even though it would be an easy way to locate criminals. And if you think well, thieves will just change the plates - no, stolen vehicles are frequently recovered on their original plates.

2) I keep saying various FB Police pages posting "we found this car X without MOT or tax, last time it was taxed in 2023!" so like...it's been driving for 3 years without anyone noticing? What are all those ANPR cameras for then??

	▲	mytailorisrich an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is the police "prioritising". Regarding your second point, I don't think you'd go scotch free but the police wouldn't bother coming to the registered keeper's address and attempt to seize the car. I believe you'd simply get automatic fines for no MOT or no insurance (plus penalty points). So that's that as long as you don't tweet tendencious things because then they might send several cars to arrest you /s