Although this could make for some great action shots for all those car-chase shows on Bravo.

err, theres sommit very wrong here...

I think that video of police activity, *all* police activity is to be welcomed if it's readily available for the public to inspect. It provides some measure of protection to the public from police abuse, and protects the police from the public (or at least provides additional evidence of misbehaviour) as well as providing evidence for the courts related to the original incident.

It's a win-win situation as long as the defendant and prosecution both have access to the material.

I followed one of their cars last weekend, which means my vehicle, license info, etc is in some private company's private database without my permission.

But people are only worried about the cops doing this sort of thing? You mean Big Business can be trusted to *not* rape everyone and everything it can for a point or two increase in share prices?

How many "private" companies are going to be conducting this warrantless Big Brother surveillance? What's next, high end "private" Googlesatellites doing real-time video and photo footage of the entire country, your privacy for sale to the Chinese for the sake of some market penetration? Or the BlueDasher cellular phone tap system next? Surely it's a "good" thing to monitor all your communications for "value added targetted advertising"?

Or is it only bad when Government calls them up as yet another customer, and perfectly okay when Visa or the Scientologists want to do some data mining?

Mine's the grey van flipping you the finger up Saratoga Drive.

and record all your journeys. Terrabyte hard drives, why not? Opportunistic WiFi router in the car (dd-wrt) which uploads to your Internet server or Google Earth. People can then follow your route. Maybe using that 3D modling thing the picture can be viewed from all angles. With enough people doing this then the virtual world can be updated from the real world in realtime.

A majority of jurisdictions in the U.S. already mandate police record every incident. Unfortunately this footage is "evidence" and not available, even to the people in the video. It's also unfortunate that the cameras only point straight ahead, action off to one side or the other of the narrow field of view is not recorded - why do you think police cars pull in at that weird crooked angle behind cars now? That way no one can see you being harassed.