I agree with you in principle and despise these cameras, but there is no expectation of privacy in public places.
I partially agree that it isn’t the private company taking pictures of license plates or cars or even facial recognition that I find objectionable, as I do agree with you on the absence of expectation of privacy in public places.
What find illegal, illegitimate, and unprincipled is the deliberate purchase of those images and data by government via taxpayer dollars to intentionally bypass legal restrictions and laws that have been put in place to protect our privacy from a prying government that is ravenous for more and more data on individual citizens in their efforts to control them.