But Chatrie found that the geofence was unconstitutional because of the wide dragnet which included people not suspected of crimes, not because those people were in private spaces:

> The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location data, because, as the opinion put it, "an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information."

The analogue with Flock is pretty clear then:

> Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government's fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn't matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database.

Not sure I agree. The only difference I see is the idea that there's no expectation of privacy while driving on public roads. That's potentially a huge difference, certainly, but I don't think it makes the negative outcome here quite as likely as you think.

Otherwise, it's the same: Google's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movements in public, and Flock's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movement in public.

The ruling in Chatrie had nothing to do with an expectation of privacy, or lack thereof. It was about the dragnet nature of the surveillance. And in that respect, I don't see any meaningful difference between Flock's and Google's systems.

Is Flock really 3rd party? Yes, they're a private entity, but they largely owe their existence to government contracts. They maintain their database on behalf of various governments. Their primary sales pitch is to law enforcement. It feels like something completely different than Alphabet's or Meta's databases of person/user data.

I do agree that Flock is also not the same as the database of cell phone location data that Verizon or Apple or whoever else might maintain.

It's somewhere in the middle, IMO. At least to my non-lawyer brain.

Yes, while I'm not a fan of fully networked, recorded, ubiquitous license plate tracking, it is quite different than the cell phone.

License plate number is a registered identifier mandated to be fully plainly visible, with that identifier tied to a registered individual; compared to cell phone which has identifiers, sure, but they're not registered to an individual necessarily, and not mandated to be plainly visible, rather only "visible" as a means of service provision.

This court has had little respect for precedent so maybe an argument here is more about the fact that rulings like this one may become more likely.

This is pretty much how SCOTUS approaches the 4th Amendment, yes.

It's basically a continuous rebalancing of private vs government power, and new technologies cause more rebalancing.

Interestingly I was watching a body cam where an off duty cop road raged punched a driver.

During the investigation the investigating officer had become worried that the assailant would use police resources to further track and harass the victim.

Luckily the guy was driving a company vehicle that did not track to his address.

In California, at least, if you are a resident of the state, you are legally required to register cars garaged in California with the California DMV. (It's actually a little ambiguous in an annoying way; even if you have a car that's garaged out of state, simply bringing it to CA for a weekend and driving it around can potentially trigger the CA registration requirement, again, assuming you are a CA resident.)

I'd be surprised if most other states don't have similar vehicle laws.

>not the tax-evasion that Straw Manners and Ad Hominem attackers make appear to be.

Depends on the state, in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion. This is not unique to Virginia BTW, Georgia has similar laws. By law in VA, all cars that are garaged in state for longer than 90 days must pay the car tax. Only reason Montana LLC registered cars get away from it is most counties find out who must pay the tax from Virginia DMV so these cars are missed.

> Here's a reminder that a Montana-LLC registered car is a legitimate privacy-preserving use case and not the tax-evasion that Straw Manners and Ad Hominem attackers make appear to be.

I mean, it’s both, right? You’re definitely getting a tax advantage compared to a lot of areas of the country. And how is insurance going to work?