The side effects cannot be worse than the medicine. License plates and modern data collection practices are far worse than any of the purported benefits.
I’m still not following, could you elaborate on the problems with license plates? What are the negative side effects, and how/why is that “far worse” than meeting safety & emission standards and catching at-fault drivers after accidents?
One thing to consider is what would happen if license plates actually did go away. This idea is completely unrealistic- license IDs & license plates (or some way for police to identify you) are never going away. But assuming they did, what would happen? This would mean an astronomical increase in hit and run accidents, in uninsured driving, and in criminal activity from unsafe driving to theft. Do you think that wouldn’t happen, and if so why? Why would having no plates be a better thing than having them?
How about this: e-ink plates plus public-key cryptography.
Your actual license number or other identifier, plus a time-based nonce, is encrypted with the DOL's public key. The displayed value changes as the nonce changes according to its schedule, so third-party observers can't correlate the displayed value across time.
If you get in a hit-and-run and note the displayed plate, the DOL has the other half of the keypair, the time, and the derivation function for the nonce, so can translate the displayed value to the actual owner.
Not being able to publish a single stable value in amber alert cases would be a bit of a regression, but you could still publish what a value would be at a particular time interval.
Doesn't do anything about governmental abuses of ALPR data but could be effective at cutting out corporate abuses. I'm probably missing something but it doesn't seem to increase info leakage w.r.t the status quo either - you'd theoretically be able to figure out when a particular image of a plate was taken, but that source would almost definitely be timestamped anyway.
e: I don't think "just ban private ALPR" is a solution; it's simply way too easy to do with COTS+FOSS and way too hard to enforce against.
How about this: e-ink plates plus public-key cryptography.
You’re suggesting that a solid plate of metal that can sit, neglected, out in the weather for multiple years without much visual wear, and when damaged by the car wash can just be bent back to shape, and replace that with your delicate little piece of electronics and software? And pile on some PKI to boot?
I’m seriously on the fence in deciding if this comment is trolling me, or if this is what late-stage HN looks like. :-)
It was definitely at least partially tongue-in-cheek ^_^
I bet you could figure out the physical aspects. E-ink tech itself has come a long way in the last few years following some patent expirations, and the electronics stuff is basically just a yubikey JB welded to a license plate frame. The cost per unit would be pretty low at scale, so just replacing borked units seems pretty doable.
Imo, a bigger problem is competent implementation. Yeah sure, the DOL is gonna run a bunch of PKI infrastructure and not mess that up. At least in my region, just keeping a largely static website up seems to be a struggle.
> I don't think "just ban private ALPR" is a solution; it's simply way too easy to do with COTS+FOSS and way too hard to enforce against.
Which leads to another issue, that local governments have contracted these corporations to do just this. From red light cameras to suvellience cams, police don't actually store this data themselves, private companies do the bulk of the work here.
It makes sense as a technical solution to the problem of not being tracked / identified by NGOs. Could work but seems a little complicated, and unlikely to end there; car, location & face recognition could achieve the same ends, by and large. (China already does this). However the bigger issue to resolve is the goals and legality. We haven’t yet established that being able to identify someone in public is bad, or conversely that being able to travel anonymously is a goal we want, right?
> car, location & face recognition could achieve the same ends, by and large. (China already does this).
Yeah, I actually started out writing that comment about how license plates are probably unnecessary given the volume of other forms of location data accessible to LE but the peak HN strat was more fun to think about.
> We haven’t yet established that being able to identify someone in public is bad, or conversely that being able to travel anonymously is a goal we want, right?
I don't have full answers here, but I think it's worth considering the modes of enforcement enabled by this change. Despite there being no de jure change in privacy protections while in public, there's been a de facto change from that kind of data only being accessible in cases of specific, targeted investigations to that kind of data being accessible to automated dragnet enforcement. Targeted investigations are inherently limited in scale and there's (at least theoretically) a nexus between the investigation and some kind of probable cause, but dragnet enforcement generally disregards fourth-amendment protections. The Carpenter decision theoretically offers some protection against this, but parallel construction is trivial enough that I'm not exactly resting easy.
So, I think it is possible to be against ALPRs without necessarily being for wholly anonymous travel in public - it's an issue of probable cause and avoiding the fruit of the poisoned tree, not one of absolute lawlessness. My (admittedly silly) suggestion is also problematic because it doesn't address this concern at all. My real feelings are a lot closer to 'calvinmorrison, but I acknowledge that "just get rid of license plates" isn't exactly a winning proposition to the average voter.
The problem is that our government cannot be trusted. The car-ification of the united states in combination with endless driving regulations creates a dragnet for the police to simply stop and detain anyone going about their daily lives.
There's no reason license plates expire, there's no reason we should have to pay for inspection, there's little proof it even is effective in improving safety.
Drivers licenses again prove very little. People are pulled over constantly for suspended and expired licenses, were the unable to drive? clearly they were.
The issue with license plates is that it creates a automatic background check on every person who drives past a police officers with an ALPR. It's about as bad as the slave catching squads from the ante-bellum era. There's no reason I should have a bench warrant from missing a traffic ticket in New Jersey cause a police officer to detain me, arrest me, jail me, and send me back to New Jersey.
The problem is, you cannot separate the benefits from the bad. The problem is the government routinely abuses their power of licensure (see may-issue licenses in new york) to the point they cannot be trusted to license at all.
Given the rampant abuses on our civil rights from the government, especially state and local governments who tend to do the day to day brunt of enforcement, I hesitate to offer them any option to be more efficient.
> The problem is that our government cannot be trusted.
Depends on what you mean, it sounds like you’re saying the government cannot be trusted to be perfect. I’d agree with that. But the counter problem is that the public cannot be trusted either. A huge number of people can and will avoid maintaining their car if they don’t have to, will wait to purchase tires until after they’re bald, will drive with smoky exhaust, will avoid paying sales taxes if they aren’t caught, will crash their cars and run if they can’t be tracked down, etc. etc.
This isn’t really a government problem, it’s a people problem. People just happen to make up the government.
> There’s no reason license plates expire, there’s no reason we should have to pay for inspection, there’s little proof it even is effective in improving safety.
Kind of a lot to unpack there. Contrary to your claim, there are reasons plates & registration & IDs expire. Whether you accept and agree with those reasons is a separate question. Cars do change hands and degrade over time. It makes sense to check in, especially from the POV of the govt who maybe primarily wants to tax any sales, and keep track of who’s associated with each license plate.
Safety and emissions inspections are improving our safety & air, and there’s data over time to show it.
> Drivers licenses again prove very little.
There’s some proof; we have lower accident rates than some other countries where drivers have a lower barrier to entry. Aside from that, licenses are partly for identification. You might not like that, but that is part of their purpose.
> It’s about as bad as the slave catching squads from the ante-bellum era.
Hard disagree. Treading dangerous water with this one.
> There’s no reason I should have a bench warrant from missing a traffic ticket in New Jersey cause a police officer to detain me, arrest me, jail me, and send me back to New Jersey.
Sure there is, you appear to be fleeing when you miss a court date and drive across state lines. I’m skeptical this happens with any regularity over minor traffic tickets with no other context and a clean record. But again you’re saying “no reason” when what you mean is you don’t like it.
> Given the rampant abuses
You’ve established that you have a fear of abuse, but not that it’s affecting you routinely. I haven’t seen any dragnets ever, personally.
> Safety and emissions inspections are improving our safety & air, and there’s data over time to show it.
I'm curious about this. Most US states do not require regular safety inspections, and some of those that do, only require them for a subset of vehicles (only commercial vehicles, only vehicles over a certain age, etc.). Around half of states require emissions testing, though often it's not yearly, and there are often exceptions for newer cars.
Certainly there are political and cost-related drivers to not requiring this sort of testing. But I do wonder what studies have been done, specifically for safety inspections: do they significantly reduce incidence of vehicle crashes, or at least of fatalities or serious injuries when crashes do happen?
These things are all decided by individual states. Permanent license plates and zero inspections are definitely a thing in some parts of the country. Drivers licenses with very long validity periods were too, until REAL ID became essentially required.
Ah, libertarianism coupled with if you cannot solve every case then you shouldn't solve any case.
I can separate the benefits from the bad. The road without rules is a net loss for everyone. Companies and individuals would gladly save on getting inspections if it saved them a few dollars at risk to everyone on the road when their bald tires and bad brakes finally failed them.
