Denver-area neighborhoods are installing license plate readers to record every vehicle that passes by

"“We can’t begin to fathom how fast we’re moving to a ‘Star Trek’ world,” said Albert Gidari, consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

The cameras themselves aren’t necessarily a violation of privacy, said Gidari, the Stanford privacy expert. They are collecting images of people traveling in public, where people implicitly give consent to being seen and photographed, he said.