I know someone that caught their wife cheating by using the ChargePoint app the wife used to charge their Chevy Bolt.
The wife charged their Chevy Bolt at work, which had a paid 'public' charger at her work site. The wife charged everyday and left it there so it could maintain battery and AC if she wanted. The chargepoint app shows the last vehicle that charged there, and a history of the last few days.
He checked her works charger histories, and noticed over a few weeks that on days she said she was still at work, the car wasn't showing on ChargePoint. He knew she was a charging fanatic. He drove to the work once. Verified she wasnt there. Called her and talked to her about how her work day is going. She pretended like she was at the actual office. She wasnt. At that point he knew, but took a few more days to fully get proof.
It wasnt their account. He had his own chargepoint account. But because its a public charge station, it shows history and its current use status. She was the only one that charged at work consistently at that charger, and had a more rare bolt instead of a tesla so her charge history was showing on a public charger.
It's 'technically' anonymous, unless you have a clue about who has what car and where they charge.
The driver in this story was convicted, didn't sound like much fun at all.... (I see your serious response to my joke and raise you some lighthearted wordplay)
My tin-hat alter ego says the three letter agencies are creating these companies for the sole purpose of then purchasing the data and skirting the law. But that guy is crazy. ha ha.
Why would the three letter agencies need to do that? There's plenty of money to be made by private businesses doing it with fewer risks of violating the law.
And the TLAs aren't interested in selling this info to state and local agencies, while that's probably the bigger dollar for private businesses.
It doesn't even need to be nefarious or direct. Companies founded by an "ex TLA employee" have increased credibility, and might even procure investment from openly CIA-affiliated venture capital firms like In-Q-Tel. And since the founder has a security clearance (they're "in the club"), the company will have no issues procuring government contracts.
I know one prominent TLA (nominally banned from domestic surveillance) that had a contract with a data broker 25 years ago. Third party doctrine lets them ignore 4A protection.
Nope. I built one of these things years ago to control a parking gate. We did a lot of legal review due to customer concerns. There’s nothing illegal unless you facilitate certain behaviors that vary by jurisdiction.
The police have huge networks. Almost all speed and red light cameras record 7-30 days of continuous video. Typically those installations cover most entry and exit points of a city. The DEA operates interstate surveillance on drug corridors. There are LPR hits and driver/passenger pictures from Maine to Miami, for example. All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.
> All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.
"Driving is a privilege" is a slogan created by authoritarians. The word "driving" doesn't appear in the constitution one way or the other. Travel is a right.
So judges are smart enough to figure out that files on a computer are the equivalent of files on paper and the only reason they didn't spell that out is that they didn't exist at the time.
The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or some other pre-automobile mode of transport. For that to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?
Driving a car is a reasonable parallel to pulling a carriage with a horse, sure.
Driving or carriages are akin to walking? No.
Everybody might have the right to walk that no one can take away from them, but everybody doesn't automatically have the right to a horse and the land required to support and feed that horse, to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away, etc.
Some means of travel have wider social consequences, costs to the commons, that need to be addressed.
EDIT: Original versin of AnthonyMouse comment specifically mentioned a right to a horse and carriage.
The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or drawing a carriage with a horse, even if cars didn't exist 200 years ago. For this to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?
> everybody doesn't automatically have the right to a horse and the land required to support and feed that horse
No one is claiming that you have a right to have someone else buy you a car or a horse, any more than you have a right to have someone else buy you a radio station.
> to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away
Ordinances that require you to clean up after your animal or have emissions controls on your car are orthogonal to whether you have a right to operate one in general.
True. The license to do so is a voluntary contract with State which persons may or may not sign.
Alternatively, avoid "motor vehicle", and don't use words they regulate such as "operator".
Anyone in USA is free to travel in a personal conveyance for non-commercial purposes while respecting property rights of others.
> driving is a privilege
Commercial licensure of that regulated activity using those words is a privilege.
> Anyone in USA is free to travel in a personal conveyance for non-commercial purposes while respecting property rights of others.
Driving is not a privilege. Anyone with funds may purchase a vehicle and drive it on private property.
Making use of roads paved by the public (through tax dollars) is a privilege. If you've failed to support the creation and upkeep of that road (by failing to pay registration- and license-related taxes) and failed to meet the minimum requirements (license, registration, vehicle insurance or a waiver, sometimes vehicle inspections, etc....) of the body that built and upkeeps that road (a governing body: local, state, or federal), you don't have permission (and you certainly don't have a right) to drive on that road.
Even if that's not the way it "should be" (expressing no opinion here), it's the way the law enforcement and judicial branches will enforce the rules of the road on you. Sovereign citizen(-adjacent, perhaps) BS like this is only likely to escalate a traffic stop and aggravate a judge. If you don't like jail, I recommend against this line of action.
> Making use of roads paved by the public (through tax dollars) is a privilege.
But this is where we get into trouble, because then the same logic would apply to walking on public roads.
And the only ingress or egress to the vast majority of residences is a public road. Otherwise the place where nearly anybody lives is fully enclosed by someone else's private property.
At which point this claim becomes "leaving your house or going back home is a privilege" which is facially unreasonable.
It also doesn't align with the way we talk about anything else. If you fail to pay your taxes you don't lose your right to a jury trial just because juries are funded by taxes. If the jury convicts you of tax evasion and the government puts you in jail, the warden will search your cell whenever he wants, but we don't say "privacy is a privilege, not a right" or claim that the government can revoke this "privilege" without due process and conviction of a crime.
And you can't get out of this by saying "but you could just walk," because in many cases you can't. The path between many locations is accessible only via limited access highway where walking is actually prohibited. It's the rule rather than the exception for the distance to be prohibitive -- it isn't reasonable to walk from one city to another, regardless of whether or not it is physically possible.
You have no right to a car, nor shoes, nor lead-free water. You have no right to force others to work to provide those for you. If you are persuasive, maybe you can ask your county commissioners to give away stuff.
In particular, there is a difference between positive and negative rights, e.g. the right to free speech is not the right to have someone else buy you a printing press or a computer.
If you get a benefit from licensure then you should voluntarily contract with the State so you can get whatever benefits are in the licensure contract.
Traveling by personal conveyance is a right. I'm not engaged in plumbing or electrical businesses so I don't take those licenses. Same for driving. I am licensed for septic installation.
That's a distinction that's really defined by place and isn't really relevant to the problem. Perhaps your neighbor is ok with your 8 year old driving through his farm to get to another part of yours - but it quickly will fail to scale beyond that 1:1 relationship as liability is a thing. By rejecting the rules of the state, it's now your problem when your culvert fails and the 8-year old is ejected from the car and is grievously injured.
At the end of the day, because the ability to drive is a function of competence and skill, it cannot be a right. Our ancestors in the 1890-1920 period weren't wild-eyed socialists - they lived through the early days with no rules.
I’m not a lawyer or a gun enthusiast. To me, the 2nd amendment clearly articulates that the government has broad discretion to regulate firearms as part of the civil militia of the citizenry. Others disagree.
With the first amendment, competence and skill don’t apply. Anyone can express themselves, assemble, complain to the government or hand out manifestos, including ignorant or stupid people. I can go start a religion and exercise all sorts of bizarre practices without approval or reprisal.
Liability is always a thing. Your physical harm to people or property is separate from the scope of a fishing license or some other State contract such as a driver license.
The 4th amendment only applies to the government, and has only ever applied to actual tangible property. This is being in public where there is no expectation of privacy.
Eh, the case law here is less clear, principally because automated surveillance at this scale has never been possible before. But its also unclear because this is a tricky zone for the (mentioned elsewhere) "State Actor Doctrine". Since there are legitimate, non-government uses of e.g. license plate tracking, that means the product and service is not, obviously, a state actor. So should the 14th amendment cover it? My gut feeling is "yes", but case law doesn't (yet) reflect that.
Did the founding fathers anticipate a situation where everyone, everywhere, in public, was being surveilled, ceaselessly, in a fashion that allowed automated tools to pick out individuals, but at basically zero cost?
"No reasonable expectation of privacy" presupposes that the potential invaders of said privacy are actual living human beings, who have to be paid for their time, and thus have to sleep, eat, excrete, blink, etc. They cannot be on the job 100% of the time without incurring considerable cost. Previously, perfectly tailing someone 100% of the time was reserved for the most valuable of targets. Now it can be affordably used on somebody with overdue parking tickets. Or whomever the summer intern at one of these shops decides is cute and has an easy-to-remember license plate.
The fourth amendment, of course, also applies to private actors when they become essentially agents of the state, by taking in a role traditionally within the purview of the state, so long as the state knows of the activity, more or less. If you would like a more accurate definition, you can search for “state actor doctrine” and you will find some cases about railroads drug testing employees and parcel carriers searching packages for contraband.
"In the private sector everything is allowed, except those that are explicitly prohibited.
In the public sector everything is prohibited, except those that are explicitly allowed."
This is why in the EU (which is not a perfect society, but 'good enough'/'better than others' we got GDPR and EUDPR which cannot and should not be ignored.
If you allow the public sector to go rogue, then freedoms and right will be corroded and eventually taken away 'for our sake'.
Well the 4th amendment does not mention a limitation to the government. It says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" it says nothing about limitation to government actors.
It does go on to talk about Warrants which are government instruments, and I agree that taking pictures of licence plates on public roads would not be a violation anyway.
But you can't argue that because I'm a private person, or that because TransUnion is not the government, that it's legal for us to go searching through peoples houses or papers or effects.
They don't need to create the companies. They just buy from them.
Anyway, license plate info isn't considered a search because it's in public, and the SCOTUS doesn't care about how scale makes what used to be tolerable, a very different beast.
I’m sure there are more than a few instances where TLAs legal said they couldn’t do it but they could buy data so they had an employee spin off a company and became the first customer.
There are always individuals and likely groups at TLAs who don’t have what most people would consider normal morals and/or think the ends justify the means. The CIA has been found to kill, torture, defame, bribe, and work with criminal organizations and enemy states to meet their ends consistently since their inception. Starting a company or organizing parties to create a company to satisfy legal requirements is about the least controversial thing they could do.
Some enterprising individual should purchase the data for the sole purpose of publishing activity of politicians, judges, and so on. I bet you the laws would change in a hurry.
Source? That sounds like it would run afoul of the 1st amendment. Most likely it's actually implemented as something vague like "intimating a public official", and prosecutors use the threat of a charge to bully people into stopping.
Or more simply, cop car detectors that publicly share where all police are in a vicinity based on camera footage. Just need some enterprising anarchists to let us leverage their ring footage. Can even do it real time!
It wouldn’t need to be a conspiracy. An employee of a three letter agency just gets “poached” by said company. Resigns from agency. Works for company, still keeps in contact with his friends at agency. Setting up those demos and meetings for their latest product are easy now.
That’s not far from the truth. A lot of these companies are located in Northern Virginia, and the sales people are tied into the intelligence community.
One of my managers at Samsung constantly brought up this theory that google was an extension of the CIA. Back in 2012 I thought he was nuts. Not so much anymore. Killed by google dot com is my #1 red flag...
Is this news? I'm genuinely asking - TLO and other skip tracing tools have been around for a while, and have been offering license plate location data for years.
The ACLU issued a report on how ALPR devices are used to track people in July 2013 (1).
Flock Safety (2) was founded in 2017 and has raised $381M from name-brand VCs like Tiger Global and A16Z. The ACLU raised concerns about them a year ago in a report. (3)
No, I don't think people realize it. Also, these brokers are basically the sole gatekeepers for this type of information - as AI recognition software becomes more potent, I think this kind of data becomes much more dangerous.
I think people know these exist. As this thread shows, I think lots of people don't _care_ that it exists, or only object to the data being sold to Amazon rather than DHS.
Maybe this is contrarian but what is the issue for a company looking to help police solve crime? It's ours, and their duty to keep our communities safe
The problem is that once this location data is available, it's easily abused by the police. Here are some quotes for you:
That's what, Cory Hutcheson, ex-Sheriff of Mississippi County, MO, is accused of doing; prosecutors say that for three years, Hutcheson abused Securus's system to track all kinds of people — even a local judge — without a warrant.https://boingboing.net/2018/05/12/extraordinary-access.html
While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.https://nyti.ms/450FPqK
U.S. Marshal Adrian O. Pena allegedly abused the Securus system by simply uploading blank documents and pretending he had authority to track people he had personal relationships with and their spouses.https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bqew/us-marshal-securus-ph...
The issue is that most people don't want to live in a surveillance state. It's not about solving or not solving crime, it's about how much police can encroach into the general public's lives. That's what warrants and probable cause are for: to allow the police to get the job done while protecting the general public's privacy/integrity. Otherwise, you might as well go back to the middle ages and deploy the royal guard. The issue at present is that private companies, typically fueled by the advertising industry, have spawned to collect and record literally anything of potential value. Then police get access to this data, often with warrants, but also often without them. See, e.g., Amazon's Ring, or all the other examples in the other reply to your comment.
I think there are basically two questions here:
1. Whether this kind of unrestricted bulk data collection (i.e., mass survaillence) should be allowed in the first place.
2. If it is allowed (presumably because the benefits outweigh the downsides, which isn't my opinion), what controls exist to access the data, what oversight exists, and who enforces it.
The current state of things is basically a free-for-all, where any collection goes, police often work in the shadow, and corporations get, at most, a slap in the wrist.
My instinctual reaction to this has always been "well, you drive around in public, and your license plate is on the back of your car, so of course you can't expect privacy of it any more than you can stop someone from following you and taking photos of it."
And generally I feel it's a valid argument, but it exposes two root problems:
1) Scale: There is a clear difference between a single person photographing license plates in a parking lot, or even a single person following one car, compared to an enterprise industrializing that tracking process through wholesale procuring of security camera footage or similar.
2) Linkage: Even if your license plate can be tracked, why should it be linked to your identity? The answer is that it really shouldn't. Of course you can register your vehicle to an LLC, but even if you don't do that, you shouldn't expect anyone on the road to map your license plate to your address. But again we return to the problem of scale, because ultimately someone could see your car in your driveway, then see it on the road, and therefore know your starting location and current location.
The first problem of scale, while clearly exposing an obvious difference, doesn't seem easily resolvable to me, because at what point is a process "industrialized?" How do you legislate against this without imposing on constitutionally protected activity, or at least basic pseudo-freedoms like freedom of commerce? And how do you avoid regulatory capture granting carve outs to a few anointed large corporations to continue the practice, especially if they're the same corporations that "contract" with the government? [One side-problem/solution here is the lack of transparency of, or restrictions on, government purchasing "public" data.]
The second problem of linkage, seems more easily addressable (no pun intended). States should put more protections on license plate databases, and make it easier for people to register their vehicle through a proxy, even without needing to create an LLC. But you still have the problem of "manual" linkage using photos of driveways.
But the larger, perhaps root issue, is that modern technology is exposing a middle ground between "private" and "public" (meta)data - we see this with enterprise-scale tracking of public information, and also with "personal data" shared with limited audiences on social media sites, where it's obviously not private because you intend to share it with people, but you also don't intend to share it with everyone.
There is a third concern besides scale and linkage -- errors and accountability. Sometimes these services are wrong.
When they are wrong, and people get arrested, go to jail, or pay thousands in legal fees to clear themselves...there is no accountability. Sometimes, the law enforcement who use the systems rely ONLY on these systems, not on the underlyer data (e.g. images) to validate an arrest.
Minimally, the services should have to produce an original image/video when surfacing information that will be used for legal action. Secondly, the services should be held financially responsible for legal costs when mistakes are made.
I’ll add a fourth: these services will inevitably be hacked, their data added to multiple darkweb data dumps, and circulated among nation states, hackers, and advertisers for the rest of time.
If an eye-witness makes an erroneous identification, or a police officer misunderstands a piece of evidence, or a witness for the prosecution is coerced into giving false testimony, is that any different? In each case we're talking about information that turned out to wrong. This is just new information in the world. Sometimes it will be wrong or sometimes we will misunderstand it -- just like all other kinds of information.
So I think that thinking was good 20 years ago but isn't fine today. The difference is really the environments we live in.
20+ years ago it really wasn't hard to be private in a public space. You walk off the main street and if you couldn't see anyone then no one could see you, generally. Same would be true about audio.
But today there's cameras everywhere and microphones everywhere, so privacy is not verifiable by simple observation. Plus, you have a GPS tracker on you that's talking to all the GPS trackers that's on everybody else.
That's where the logic breaks down, but it requires subtly and a bit more nuance because the way we're tracked is covert and not as obvious. It can be automated and doesn't require someone to physically follow you. It can gather way more information that that person physically following you every could.
It's not that the former logic was bad, it's that it works on a certain set of assumptions. Assumptions that don't hold true today. The problem we face today with a lot of arguments we have (more than privacy) is that people tend to be working under different assumptions, assuming everyone else has equivalent ones. Additionally, our assumptions are frequently wrong and we end up fighting rather than discussion, which it's fine to disagree with.
Privacy could be a use case for those e ink license plates that have started showing up in California.
Instead of the "real" number, change the plate every 5 minutes using some sort of OTP algorithm. Makes it impossible for anyone with a camera to put together a location database, but the car is still identifiable by law enforcement if necessary.
Had never heard of these plates. At least the current models may well make the problem worse:
> "In addition to the flexibility of the display, the digital plates also sport a tracking device that will alert the police to the location of a stolen vehicle and allow for general vehicle tracking. While a lot of people can get behind the idea of never going to the DMV again, not a lot of people are thrilled about the whole “license plate as tracking device” angle"
An OTP license plate scheme is a very interesting idea. The license plate would probably have to get larger to accommodate more characters.
EDIT: I wonder why you got downvoted. I've recently been seeing a lot of downvoted comments that there's little conceivable reason to downvote, so I wonder if downvoting is a new way of trolling.
It is being downvoted because it is a silly idea. These systems are ran in cooperation with the state, who in turn would just un-OTP your plate at the time of scan. That means average citizens are the only ones who would end up with less data.
That means average citizens are the only ones who would end up with less data
That doesn't sound like a drawback, I can understand the public benefit of the police being able to look me up by license plate number but not for the average citizen being able to do the same. This is separate from the issue that there should be stricter limits on law enforcement use of the data.
I can understand the public benefit of the government being able to stalk me but not for the average citizen being able to do the same. When the government does it, it's obviously for The Greater Good™.
That's not what GP said. There are legitimate reasons for the government to track people, there are not legitimate reasons for private citizens to do so. That doesn't mean all tracking by the government is "for the greater good", but at least there is a chance it's acceptable. There is no chance with private citizens.
Average citizens are not the ones operating bulk collection systems. They are simply writing down a plate number of the car parked next to them when they find a giant door scratch in a parking lot.
It was clearly an idea worth discussing judging by the follow up comments, downvoting on HN is for unproductive comments not disagreement.
To the parent comments point, I have noticed more downvotes on valid but disagreeable comments recently, I think there might be some weight to it anecdotally.
Assuming that the function that generates the plate numbers from the current time and a per plate seed is deterministic this shouldn't be a problem.
You tell the police you saw the car with plate 2XYZ345 do a hit on run and give a time range. The state would have the seeds in its plate owner database and could generate a list of all cars that had 2XYZ345 sometime in that time range.
Presumably such a system would keep a history of expired identifiers, so law enforcement could still look it up after it's been expired and replaced with a new one.
> Makes it impossible for anyone with a camera to put together a location database, but the car is still identifiable by law enforcement if necessary.
Isn't it LEO that's deploying most of these systems? At least around here, *MOST* of the motorola cameras I see are on public roads / traffic signals. Bit of google shows EFF and other orgs FOIA-ing various counties in CA and a lot of them got federal money for their police to install them...
Look at Flock Safety for a private company doing this with private entities and sharing the results with law enforcement "partners".
"Now, you go from a crime in progress to instantly find the suspect when you search by:
Visual Evidence
- Vehicle make, type, and color
- License plate (missing plate, covered plate, state of the license plate)
- Unique features (roof rack, bumper stickers, and window stickers)
- Contextual Evidence
Timestamp
- Number of times this vehicle has been seen in the last 30 days
- Associated vehicles"
"Neighborhoods and businesses can download vehicular evidence, get a case number, and give it to the assigned detective. Vehicle data and license plates are the most requested piece of evidence.
If a known stolen vehicle or wanted person enters the community, local police will instantly get an alert on their cell phone or laptop. Up to 60% of stolen vehicles are associated with additional crime."
"With the Flock Safety network, your [law enforcement] agency is not limited to cameras you own — connect and collaborate with adjacent agencies and nearby privately-owned cameras in neighborhoods to extend your reach and multiply your search capacity."
We can just make it illegal if we want. We can pass a law and then enforce that law.
There’s plenty of precedent for similar laws. Credit reports are another form of aggregating information about you that comes from other people’s reporting and it’s extremely circumscribed.
You can’t keep files on what people think of my credit history without following very very detailed rules, as well as being strictly liable in private action for breaking any of the rules even by small technicalities.
We can outlaw this if we want. Or restrict it heavily.
I’m tired of listening to arguments that we can’t regulate commerce. It’s just learned helplessness after listening to generations of corporate lobbying.
> I’m tired of listening to arguments that we can’t regulate commerce. It’s just learned helplessness after listening to generations of corporate lobbying.
Exactly. We don't need to go on some moral and ethical odyssey to discover where the line is. We can just draw a line and say "thats the line." The notion that we must be fair and equitable to business and commerce is tiring. No, we don't.
You can make a law to outlaw it, what you cannot expect is the side that does not want that law to not voice their opinions and not make arguments counter to yours.
You're going to have to do a lot of work if you want to pass such a law.
I expect the other side to attempt to influence politicians with money by hiring their former staffers and children as lobbyists, paying them off with bullshit speaking gigs, planting opinion pieces and influencing online commentators, and any of the thousand other ways big business tries to bulldoze consumers in this country.
What's that got to do with anything? The point I'm making, of course, is that "fuck these people" is the right way to think about it.
There's no human right to make money off selling license plate data or something. People can find another business model or something else to do with their lives. Fuck them, and fuck their consumer privacy invading businesses.
At least in the US the law starts at "this is allowed", the imperative then is for you to promote a law saying it is forbidden. As much as you, me, or anyone else thinks it's the right thing to do, you still have to go through the process of making a law just like the opposition group does.
would you really not expect that people shouldn't follow you around? if i drive around the city taking pictures of you in your car, that's harassment. why can a company do it? it's one thing for it to be available for polling if there's a crime, it's another thing to sell that data to anyone
This comes down to the difference between certain people around town recognizing your car if they happen to see it pass by, vs them hiring dedicated car-watchers all around town to keep track of your comings and goings and selling the data to anyone who comes asking.
One is acceptable, the other is simply not.
You don't really get a choice to use or not use a license plate if you want to drive, and are seriously disadvantaged if you do not have a car in most places in the US. Should it be a requirement to give up your privacy to participate meaningfully in society?
In my jurisdiction, the local transit authority keeps a database of every fare payment ever made, with no expiry policy or any other future-looking privacy measures. The records are easily and routinely subpoenaed by law enforcement, and non-anonymized datasets are shared with researchers, as long as they pinky-swear to not compromise anyone's privacy. You can pay in cash, but have to pay an extra fee for a new fare card each time you want a new unique ID.
Painting with an incredibly broad brush while also oversimplifying the situation to the degree of misunderstanding is, I'm sure, emblematic of the people wherever you come from.
It's pretty easy to stick it back on the government here.
License plates were originally sold in a time before mass surveillance, when they didn't constitute a de facto tracking device. Now they do constitute a tracking device, but you're still required by law to carry one wherever you go.
And that's the thing we need to fix, because nobody should have this data. Not corporations, not the government, and not the criminals and foreign governments who are going to violate whatever law you propose to solve this in some way other than removing the legal requirement to carry a tracking device.
Yeah this is the point I find myself repeatedly making. In the internet age we're increasingly grappling with increases in quantity that become a quality of their own. Capture of public data points that seems reasonable, or even harmless, at the scale of manual human work can become a major instrument of coercion when networked computers can collate information from across the globe
And do note that we have some precedence for understanding how legal actions can become illegal by magnitude with the offence of stalking. Taking pictures of people in public is generally legal, but repeatedly targeting the same person is in many cases not
This is so infuriating to me. It's also shocking to see how not shy TransUnion is about promoting a service like this.
How long is it before anyone can find out the location of anyone else in real time? It's usually only a matter of time before things like this drop in price and become consumer tools, which is a scary proposition (not to downplay how scary it is already.)
I always had the idea of building something similar to this for my own use: have a dashcam recording while I was driving, and every night taking those videos and extract the timestamp/GPS/plate number and a short video clip of all cars I encountered on that day.
I haven't thought too much about why documenting these would be useful, but on top of my mind I could get answer of these questions:
- have I seen this fancy/unique looking car in the past?
- is this the same douche bag that I saw last week who can't drive?
- what's the last CA plate number starts with now? Is it 9G or 9H?
- are there more people driving w/ a 9[A-Z] plate in my town? (As a proxy of knowing how many people are still buying new cars in my town)
Have you ever tried to read a license plate on dash cam footage? Unless they’re right in front of you in traffic it’s basically impossible. You would probably need a high resolution camera taking pictures every couple seconds instead or maybe when 8k dash cams are commonly available.
Um, yeah, a couple of months ago I pulled my 4k dashcam footage for a car I was following reasonably closely, and I was shocked at how hard it was to make out the correct number plate. But that's largely because the camera is (rightly) extremely wide-angle.
Police cars with ANPR presumably have a camera with a slightly more zoomed-in view. I don't know.
> Police cars with ANPR presumably have a camera with a slightly more zoomed-in view.
Sixteen+ years ago when making demo plate recognition systems for mobile use, the "cameras" were good lenses onto industrial machine vision processing arrays.
Light sensor cells backed by neighbourhood array processing hardware that was uploaded with a series of filters -
anti jiggle filter to reduce vibration effects so that successive frames "stacked" correctly and the ROI (region of interest) didn't wobble,
Then a ROI search to best guess "back end" of vehicle and licence plate location
sharpness filters to enhance letter against plate contrast
letter + digit "trained" filters that were primed to do the best match
The output was dejiggled "smoothed" images (ie nearly raw made up of rolling average of a few successive frames == good clear slighly processed image) + "best match" image (previous smoothed image + sharpened + overlaid best guess letter shapes) + text output of guessed licence plate.
All that worked pretty well - that was my last contact with that specific job, I was doing a lot of speculative contract work for a machine vision specialist supplier at the time.
This is the market that powers the advertising industry, which in turn powers most consumer services, and billion-dollar companies. It's not going away anytime soon.
Individuals are generally unaware this even exists. Even if they are, few are willing to fight it; and even if they are, there's hardly anything an individual can do to change this.
Regulation needs to exist to prevent this, but considering governments are likely also using this data, and that lawmakers are in bed with lobbyists, the chances of that happening are also slim.
Can you register cars under a company or other shell entity? I feel like the only way to get around this kind of stuff is to have layers of abstraction above your identity.
I've seriously given some thought to do exactly this. It's not particularly difficult. You need a valid business entity (Which you can create for about $100 a year in some states), and a car paid for in cash. Then any LEO running the plates through ALPR will have no idea who identity of the driver is. Literally millions of small business owners do this so it's not particularly unusual.
You can probably use the usual tricks of money launderers to obfuscate the ownership structure of the LLC. eg. you're the beneficial owner but the director is listed as your lawyer.
In Washington State they require an individual to present identification when registering the vehicle (doesn't need to be a WA driver's license though if you're registering the vehicle to a corporation).
State DMVs are ultra-obsessive about tying an individual to every vehicle.
I'm struggling to find the link, but there was a really good CCC talk about this (around 5-8 years ago?) In the talk, they demonstrate Experian's traffic camera database of license plate images.
They sell those, but broadly speaking they're both illegal and ineffective.
The way ALPR systems typically work is that there's a camera running OCR against rectangular objects in frame. What you're asking is whether there's a way for a only human eyes to be able to see the plate. That doesn't exist for obvious reasons. Products that attempt to do this anyway usually try to reduce viewing angles or blur things, but these aren't very effective strategies.
Furthermore, obscuring your license plate for any reason is illegal in every jurisdiction.
I can't speak to the ratio, but I know many local law enforcement agencies which mount these on patrol cars -- the LE agency benefits from access to the databases and in return provides data to the databases.
There are tons of private collectors, but lots of LE agencies are doing it too.
> There are tons of private collectors, but lots of LE agencies are doing it too.
A good 90% of hits are from one of two sources: fixed traffic installations and parking garages. Maybe 10 years ago repo companies would put them on trucks and drive around mall parking lots, but the return was so low most scrapped them.
It's all about the databases. Reading license plates isn't, all by itself, a very serious privacy problem. It becomes a problem, though, when that data is combined with hundreds or thousands of other data points (each of which also aren't a huge deal in isolation).
The privacy violation isn't really in the camera, or the telemetry, or any other data point you generate that is collected. It's in the combining of all of these things into a profile.
I built one of these as a hackathon during undergrad. It was surprisingly easy to get something working, even before modern DL techniques, in under 24 hours. I'm not surprised this has taken off.
I always thought collecting license plate data was considered confidential and only be used for law enforcement purposes. Aren't there laws forbidding this?
The article talks about privacy being violated via your car, but it's ostensibly a fluff piece for a website that asks for your VIN just so it can grab the manufacturer's privacy policy.
This cover sounds like something that could easily be illegal depending on the location.
Quick research says that license plate covers are "Allowed" in just 16/50 states, though I have no idea how accurate the source is and it also says that the "Allowed" designation "only" means that that that state requires license plates to be easily readable. (One of the table rows is "Arizona: Arizona | Arizona", so perhaps it's not very accurate.)
Still, regardless of how reliable the sources I found are, I'd be shocked to find many states that don't have prohibitions on making it difficult for red-light/speed/ALPR cameras to read plates.
Luckily most states have provisions that don't allow red-light / speed cameras in general. And we should keep it that way.
It is insane that I can get accused of an infringement by a piece of software. I have the right to face my accuser in court. Who are you going to put on the stand? The camera? The CEO of Gatso?
ALPR is done for turnpikes & some HOAs are deploying them to track who comes in and goes out.
While I don't condone getting a cover for the purpose of avoiding taxes on turnpikes, I do condone them for avoiding ALPRs to avoid private companies from tracking me.
The wife charged their Chevy Bolt at work, which had a paid 'public' charger at her work site. The wife charged everyday and left it there so it could maintain battery and AC if she wanted. The chargepoint app shows the last vehicle that charged there, and a history of the last few days.
He checked her works charger histories, and noticed over a few weeks that on days she said she was still at work, the car wasn't showing on ChargePoint. He knew she was a charging fanatic. He drove to the work once. Verified she wasnt there. Called her and talked to her about how her work day is going. She pretended like she was at the actual office. She wasnt. At that point he knew, but took a few more days to fully get proof.