Anyways, I'm not that interested in the broader long-term constitutional debate. I'm just interested in shutting down the glib Anti-Pinkerton cite.
And explicity notes that it's the relative scarcity of them that matters.
> Decades later, in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), location-tracking technology crossed the line from merely augmenting to impermissibly enhancing. There, police used a GPS-tracking device to remotely monitor and record a vehicle’s movements over 28 days. Id. at 402–04. Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
> Thus, Carpenter solidified the line between short-term tracking of public movements—akin to what law enforcement could do “[p]rior to the digital age”—and prolonged tracking that can reveal intimate details through habits and patterns.
Put enough of them up, and the software to track between them, and you're in "enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements" territory.
I'll tell you what's not going to happen, with certainty: we're not going to get to a point with ALPRs where it becomes so abusive that the Supreme Court decides municipalities can't track cars at all.
Sure. But they may get restricted somewhat, as they are if they want to demolish my house without my consent.