Amanda Mooney posted a note about being told she needed corporate permission to take a picture in a store. Mooney’s interest was in telling others how much she likes the products and the brand — exactly the sort of word of mouth advertising most brands are anxious for, but imagine some more pedestrian uses: what about the customer who wants a friend’s opinion about a new skirt? Can that customer snap a cell phone pic to send?

Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier reports on increasing limits to photography in public spaces and the supposed link between terrorist threats and photography. It’s nonsense, he says, but the trend is increasing.

Taking and sharing pictures builds community. Flickr knows this. Facebook, with more than 14 million photo uploads daily, knows this. What exactly are public officials and sales executives worried about?

(photo credit: Xava du)

Engadget yesterday had a story about the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that mounts on police cars and scans 500 to 800 license plates an hour. More details are in the Wired News story, where LA County police commander Sid Heal notes that the system is hands-off: “It doesn’t require the [officer] to do anything.” The plates are automatically checked against a database of stole cars, and the patrolling officer when the system finds a match.

“We read them coming at us. We read them going by us. We read them parked,” said Mark Windover, president of Remington-Elsag, the developer of the system.

What the article didn’t say is if this is at all related to the license plate reader system by Andrew Bucholz that I reported on in February. At the time, I noted that I was surprised that there wasn’t yet a cameraphone service that would return details about a vehicle and driver based on a picture of the license plate.

Clearly, this is real. Welcome to the world of automated, pervasive surveillance.

tags: LA county, license plate, license plate reader, license plates, mobile, pervasive, police, police car, police cruiser, police state, scanner, surveillance