Private license-plate scanners invade our privacy — but recovered my car

Imagine a world where your daily travels can be bought and sold to anyone who is interested in tracking you.

Sound far-fetched? It's not when it comes to your daily driver.

There are now nearly a billion stored, digitized images of license plates throughout the United States. This, along with the temporary storage of hundreds of millions of other plates, represents a new market of public information that can be accessed by nearly anyone who has an interest in your whereabouts.

The bank that finances your car. Your employer. An attorney seeking damages. Or even a private investigator seeking a skeleton or two in your closet. They all can find out where you have been, and even where you are likely to go in the near future. The opportunity to capitalize on this public information is also far quicker than you would imagine.

 I know it can work this quickly for one reason: I have personally used this tech to reclaim my own property.

Digital Recognition Network, an information provider to banks and auto finance companies, tells its clients who are seeking to find their vehicles: "Your authorized agents receive real-time alerts when in the vicinity of your asset. Within minutes the vehicle identity is validated, an assignment order transmitted and the asset secured."

As a car dealer in rural Georgia, I recently had to recover one of my own vehicles, a Honda Civic, from the most difficult type of person to repossess a car from — a repo man.