Data broker TLO is now selling the location of your car to all comers.
Cops, casinos, repo men, and others who have photographed and identified license plates have allowed TLO to build its Vehicle Watch product on top of a database of 1 billion sightings. Fifty thousand new entries are added each month.
This product can assist attorneys, private investigators, and others in pinning down your location and the time you were there. It can create a map of your locations through time.
TLO charges $10 for each search in current, recent, and historical categories. Vehicle Watch uses license plate recognition technology and location information to find a car and pin it to the map at a specific time.
As Adrian Tanner noted in Forbes, “In reality, the feature is quite far from the all-knowing eye in the sky, although it can still reveal intimate clues.” Those in the industry believe it is “years and years away from possessing enough data to reconstruct a random person’s driving on a given day.”
TLO is hardly the only company in this sector. And with the Supreme Court having ruled that law enforcement needs a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to a vehicle, this type of approach seems set to become a much more prominent in the next few years.
H/T Forbes | Photo by Eric Lin/Flickr