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Driving has never been anonymous. The license plate is readable from a distance for a reason.
by thrownaway2424 10y ago
Driving has never been anonymous. The license plate is readable from a distance for a reason.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoAnd walking?
- thrownaway2424 10y agoWhat about it?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoFacial recognition software.
- thrownaway2424 10y agoAgain I'm not really seeing your point. One goes about in public "openly and notoriously" as the legal jargon goes. It is expected that one's face would be recognized.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI really can't stand people who use "Not seeing your point" as a substitute for "Disagree with your point."
- thrownaway2424 10y agoI'm actually using it as shorthand for "your sentence fragments do not amount to an argument."
- Aelinsaar 10y agoTrust me, that's not what it's shorthand for.
- throwanem 10y agoUnless you walk around wearing a license plate around your neck, I'm not sure how it's relevant here.
- tomtoise 10y agoOne could argue that you're wearing a license plate 'on' your neck. Facial recognition and that.
- lozf 10y agoDon't forget "Gait DNA"[0] for tracking your movement through a crowd, even when your face can't be seen. [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6995061.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI wear my face above my neck, thanks.
- hackuser 10y agoYour phone is probably in your pocket.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI have the choice to leave my phone at home, or take out the battery, or if I'm feeling incredibly paranoid even stick it in a Faraday cage. My face, is my face.
- Bartweiss 10y agoReadable, sure. They provided a way to identify the owners of specific cars without stopping them. But with the advent of digital photography, image recognition, and computerized databases, they do something very different. They make it possible to track everyone passing through a place, and to correlate every sighting of someone to build up a profile of their life. Sure, surveillance isn't novel. But a sufficient quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. Bulk tracking of everyone in a city is something completely new, and there's good reason to be uncomfortable with it.
- thrownaway2424 10y agoI don't disagree with your facts but I also don't think they lead to your conclusion. One does not expect privacy in public, by definition.
- baconner 10y agoThis is clearly true, but legally speaking I think it's time we start reevaluating as a society how far we let this swing. Technology has changed the meaning of no reasonable expectation of privacy dramatically. 100 years ago you couldn't expect not to be overheard or followed (at great cost per individual followed). Today you can't expect not to be recorded and location tracked at all times and it's low cost per person so everyone can be followed and surveiled all the time. We can disagree if this is a net positive or negative to society, but IMO a lot of folks are treating it as if nothing has changed because the core law hasn't changed. That's missing the point - the scale change is very significant.
- rtkwe 10y agoIt's the accumulation and correlation of the data that's the problem. At a high enough density you essentially have everyone being followed their entire lives. Formerly if the police wanted to know everywhere that a person visited because they suspected them of crime X they'd have to invest a certain level of resources which means targets had to be chosen judiciously. Now we're approaching a point where they can just trawl everyone's movements looking for anything they like, and as the algorithms get better and the density of things like CCTV and the license plate readers increases it gets easier and easier to follow anyone back in time. IF the police were filled with perfect angels and laws were all perfectly reasonable and just allowing that might approach being ok. Instead we have a police force made of people who do things like harass whistle blowers who reveal corruption or cover ups or people they have personal vendettas against (or unrequited love toward).
- Retric 10y agoSomeone in the 1930's could write down a plate and with a lot of effort transform that into a name. Passively collecting the names of everyone that happens to go past a camera is qualitatively different.