Huh? The whole reason license plates exist is to be read. What makes a machine reading it always immoral compared to a human? Particularly the police identifying vehicles they're searching for. Why shouldn't they use technology to help find criminals instead of sitting around watching cars go by with their own eyes?
I once had a problem with my car in a big carpark. I asked the security guard for help and he wanted my license plate number. He typed it into the computer and the camera found my car and panned and zoomed onto it. Amazing! Much easier than trying to explain the location. So there's your non-immoral example and you can stop worrying.
As for privacy. So what? Where are people going in public that's such a secret? If you want to do something secretly, do it in private. If it involves using the public streets, then accept that it's public.
None of those things are really private anyway. Private investigators, police, or stalkers can follow people from their house to wherever they go, and can identify you by your car's appearance even without the license plate. The difference here could be in the scale and ease of access to such data though.
Nobody seems to mind that Google Streetview shows cars. My sister visited her mother in another city at the time they drove past so now there's a permanent record that she was there at that time to anyone who knows what her car looks like. Is that a problem too?
> "Private investigators, police, or stalkers can follow people from their house to wherever they go, and can identify you by your car's appearance even without the license plate."
If we ignore the obvious possibility of blackmailing people who have something (legal) to hide, there's also a huge problem of innocent people being in a wrong place at a wrong time. It's not hard to presume that police would use such database to quickly find everyone with a previous convictions who were in the neighborhood when crime happened, and would then try really hard to connect them to it. Which is great if they pick the right guy right away, but history teaches us that they often don't. Mistakes happen a lot in investigations, and this type of tool - if police trust it too much - could make it even easier for them to jump to conclusions and fall for prejudices. Even if they don't, at the best, it will still create a lot of inconvenience to people who only happened to drive too close to the crime scene in a wrong time. Having police questioning you is very sensitive and unpleasant experience, especially if you're not the white middle-class and you have previous convictions. Police coming to your work can get you fired immediately even if you're completely innocent. Or landlord can kick you out, or wife can leave you. You could easily completely screw up someone's life with this, and still not get any closer to solve the actual crime.
The problem there is the police using bad processes. That's not insolvable. Courts already have processes to protect against some of that cherry picking and prosecutor's fallacy type stuff. Avoiding technology doesn't seem like a sensible solution when safety processes already work in many areas.
If you can legally be fired for having police show up at work, then you're at risk of being fired for any reason and that itself is a problem. Solve that problem with employment protection laws like many countries already have.
You're talking about a wishful thinking, I'm talking about the (for many people rather harsh) reality. I agree, it can (and should) be solved in the ways you mention, but this technology will not wait, it's here now. At the moment it's just incredible how often cops and prosecutors will trick possibly innocent people into plea bargaining to close the cases as quickly as possible and avoid having to prove them guilty in actual trials. Tech that makes it easier to round-up "the usual suspects" will just make it easier for them to do it to an even bigger group of people.
The conflation of privacy and secrecy is an issue that deserves addressing: When you walk into a public restroom stall, it's not really a secret what you're going to do in there. But you still close the door, don't you?
What I'm doing or where I'm going may not be a secret, but that doesn't mean I want the details logged and sold by some data broker.
I once had a problem with my car in a big carpark. I asked the security guard for help and he wanted my license plate number. He typed it into the computer and the camera found my car and panned and zoomed onto it. Amazing! Much easier than trying to explain the location. So there's your non-immoral example and you can stop worrying.
As for privacy. So what? Where are people going in public that's such a secret? If you want to do something secretly, do it in private. If it involves using the public streets, then accept that it's public.