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

err, theres sommit very wrong here...

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.

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.