7 ms·

That sign telling you how fast you’re driving may be capturing license plates

jstanley 8y ago
> “We don’t know when somebody’s going to commit a crime, we don’t know when somebody’s going to run over somebody and take off,” said Joe Giacalone. “So that data should be there forever. We never know when we’re going to need it.” That's a pretty tone-deaf response.
- stretchwithme 8y ago
  I don't see a problem with individuals keeping track of what vehicles or people coming into their neighborhoods or on their property. Or with remembering that for a long time. If government needs to know, they can ask the public to check their records or get a court order if they suspect a specific route was taken during the commission of a crime. Do I want authorities to be able to track dissidents wherever they go? No.
  - brainwad 8y ago
    If you don't see a problem with individuals keeping track of who comes onto their property, what's the problem with the government keeping track of who comes onto their property (i.e. public space)? Yet again, privacy advocates are trying introduce privacy into the public sphere, where it has no place. Privacy is to protect what you do in private, not what you do in public.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      The difference is that individuals can't build a database that covers almost all public space and allows for large scale data mining, while governments can.
      - donatj 8y ago
        The other difference is that individuals don’t have a reputation for genocide, whereas governments certainly do.
      - brainwad 8y ago
        Individuals who owned a lot of property definitely could. It's just a matter of degree, not a fundamental difference between individuals and government.
        pmiller2 8y ago
        Also consider that said “individuals” may be corporations.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Meh. On the one hand, I'm against tracking everyone, everywhere. On the other hand, I'm totally for ALPRs dispensing indiscriminate justice on people violating speed limits. I wish we could have auditable, trustworthy ALPR boxes that only report speed violations to be immediately turned into tickets, and don't store license plate numbers of people who follow the law.
- Jmcdd 8y ago
  Don't forget stolen, untaxed, and uninsured vehicles too
- adrianN 8y ago
  I really don't understand why we don't enforce speed limits more rigorously. We have the technology to do this at basically zero cost and speeding is one of the main causes of death on the road. Especially in residential areas where pedestrians and cyclists are around even moderate speeding dramatically increases the chances of deadly accidents. Doing 30mph instead of 20mph increases the chance of death for pedestrians from 5% to 45%. [1] [1] http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    The real issue I have is that speed limits are selectively and arbitrarily enforced. This basically means that most people just end up breaking the law anyways and it allows law enforcement a convenient excuse to find a reason to fault someone.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    > Doing 30mph instead of 20mph increases the chance of death for pedestrians from 5% to 45%. What is this metric supposed to imply though? We obviously have roads with limits above 30mph already, so clearly decisions aren't made based on merely chance-of-death-assuming-a-collision being too high.
    - mprev 8y ago
Jmcdd 8y ago
Looks like the US is getting ANPR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recog...
- BrentOzar 8y ago
  Big US cities have had mobile license plate readers for a while: https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/13/cpd-license-plate-readers/ https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/13/cpd-license-plate-re... Just not coordinated at the national level yet. It would be pretty expensive given the size of the country, the number of police vehicles involved, and the current cost per vehicle.
reacweb 8y ago
There are a lot of burglaries in France. The recognition of license plates combined with mobile phone location information would make it possible to identify burglars and even catch them in the act. All the data are available, it would be sufficient to collect them for analysis.
INTPenis 8y ago
I hope it is, that's where I'd put the camera if I was in charge. Makes a lot of sense. Only problem with that theory is that regular speed trap cameras are designed to be easily managed. Easily washed and easily replaced. So the end result is a big almost tower-like structure that in my country sometimes is empty depending on where they've deployed the actual camera, which sits inside this tower. So placing a seemingly hidden camera inside a digital sign has some challenges. Like for example servicability and cleaning. Cars produce a lot of grit so having a large lens area that is easily cleaned actually helps. They also work at night by using flash, which also requires some structure that might be visible.
TomMarius 8y ago
It doesn't sometimes?
loser777 8y ago
Enforcing speed when the intent is public safety rather than revenue generation requires more nuance than what the current system in the US has to offer. Does it make sense to strictly enforce a 20 or 25 mph limit in areas with residential/pedestrian traffic? Certainly, especially given that pedestrians crossing a street are essentially at a 25 mph speed difference relative to perpendicular traffic. But if we apply this arithmetic to semi trailers traveling at 65 mph on the highway, a 25 mph difference would suggest a speed limit of 90 mph, even neglecting the safety difference in a vehicle-vehicle collision. Where are most current speeding tickets issued? Is it in low-speed, residential areas where drivers know that an extra 5 mph won't save them any time at all (and would greatly increase the risk of injury in an accident)? Or is it in high-speed straights on the highway where an extra 15 mph can save you hours on long trips (where a speed limit effectively grandfathered from the malaise era still applies)? Another consideration: if speed enforcement on highways was so critical to public safety, why are radar detectors and even laser jammers legal in many US jurisdictions? My perception is that physics-based policy decisions never get far in the US system. Ultimately, automated enforcement/better technology seems orthogonal to the policy problem. We should get the policy right first.
- imgabe 8y ago
  > Is it in low-speed, residential areas where drivers know that an extra 5 mph won't save them any time at all (and would greatly increase the risk of injury in an accident)? Based on my personal experience in such areas, drivers very much do not know this. The number of people speeding down residential streets in my city just to get to a red light at the end of a block is astonishing.
  - Chris_Chambers 8y ago
    What city?
- fyfy18 8y ago
  For a comparison, the other week I drove 4000km across Europe and most of the speed cameras I came across were in areas where the speed actually makes a difference i.e. in towns and residential areas. Along a three lane motorway it doesn’t make much difference whether you go at 130kmh or 160kmh, if you aren’t paying attention and do something stupid it’s going to end badly either way. From seeing where speed was actually enforced, it seems that the authorities here believe that too.
jobigoud 8y ago
With advances in technology, the trend is that we are more and more able to catch speeding, red light passing, and other infractions. And it turns out a lot of people are eventually doing some. I'm wondering what would be the consequences of a truly omniscient system, where each and every infraction would be immediately caught. We could maybe have mandatory black boxes in vehicles that transmit the infraction in real time. It seems with a truly complete system, every driver would eventually run out of points on their license and wouldn't be allowed to drive anymore.
- ryanmarsh 8y ago
  I started asking my family over ten years ago: What do you imagine life will be like when a super high resolution camera with terabytes of storage that can run on a solar cell costs $5? Because that’s where we’re headed.
- btrettel 8y ago
  I don't think following the rules of the road the vast majority of the time is that hard. Yes, you will make mistakes from time to time, but any reasonable system would recognize that. And sometimes following the law is less safe, but that's extremely rare in my experience. The problem is that many drivers, if not the majority of drivers, have no problem intentionally breaking the law as it suits them (e.g., speeding, unsafe passing, etc.). I am a cyclist who rides with a helmet camera. It's amazing how much this seems to change some drivers' behavior. One moment they're rude and/or dangerous, the next they are keeping their distance and driving the speed limit. These drivers choose to drive dangerously because they think it saves time. (I'd argue the time savings are much smaller than they believe.) These people are the ones I think an automated system would catch, and I have no problem with that. (As a cyclist, I follow the law to the letter, by the way. You will not catch me running reds. In fact, I have gone through the local police's stop sign enforcement efforts twice and passed.)
ryanmarsh 8y ago
There’s RFID antennas everywhere grabbing your toll tag number. Frankly this is a drop in the ocean of much more precise and voluminous data gathering on you. This one is the least of my worries.
dzdt 8y ago
The "Vigilant" database mentioned is actually a product of a private company. There is essentially zero limitation or oversight on what they do with license plate data. From the point of view of the law, there is no expectation of privacy on a public street. One of their main customer bases are people who "recover" vehicles where the buyer is not keeping up with loan payments. They have thousands of private cameras in operation, making an ever expanding private dragnet available to anyone with the money to buy the data.
bradfa 8y ago
Your car likely gets its picture taken, and probably license plate automatically read, every time you drive through a toll booth, too. No one seems to be outraged over toll booths doing this, so why should any other public road sign (or private road sign that you, the driver, don't own) be any different? Don't like being tracked by YOUR plate? Find other ways to achieve your transportation goals: ride a bike, take the bus, walk, use a taxi and pay cash, borrow a car, etc. Sure, you could be tracked by facial recognition but that's a lot harder to do currently than reading some very well defined characters from a highly visible license plate and it's much easier to legally change your appearance than to change your plate.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  The ACLU says Any entity that uses license plate readers should be required to report. https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac... That kind of sounds inclusive of toll booths.
  - ectospheno 8y ago
    Their 5 desired behaviors are admirable. The 2nd item, "The government must not store data about innocent people for any lengthy period." is hard to implement given existing police department budgets. The only way for you to know you can delete is to perform an investigation to verify you can delete. Doing that every few months on each plate isn't reasonable. You could speed up the process by having a national database but I imagine they would be even less happy about that. I love the ACLU. I donate monthly. I fear a US without the ACLU far more than I fear a US with the ACLU. But every now and then I don't think they have completely thought out the opposing point of view or the realities of time and money.
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      I don't understand your logic. Why can't they just delete any information that isn't part of an active investigation? Because they don't want to take any heat from pro-authoritarians in the case that a later investigation could have used the evidence? In the past police departments have been happy enough to just ignore rape kits for years and years. I guess people would flip their shit if unprocessed rape kits were destroyed, but that's specific evidence...

> “We don’t know when somebody’s going to commit a crime, we don’t know when somebody’s going to run over somebody and take off,” said Joe Giacalone. “So that data should be there forever. We never know when we’re going to need it.” That's a pretty tone-deaf response.

stretchwithme 8y ago
I don't see a problem with individuals keeping track of what vehicles or people coming into their neighborhoods or on their property. Or with remembering that for a long time. If government needs to know, they can ask the public to check their records or get a court order if they suspect a specific route was taken during the commission of a crime. Do I want authorities to be able to track dissidents wherever they go? No.
- brainwad 8y ago
  If you don't see a problem with individuals keeping track of who comes onto their property, what's the problem with the government keeping track of who comes onto their property (i.e. public space)? Yet again, privacy advocates are trying introduce privacy into the public sphere, where it has no place. Privacy is to protect what you do in private, not what you do in public.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    The difference is that individuals can't build a database that covers almost all public space and allows for large scale data mining, while governments can.
    - donatj 8y ago
      The other difference is that individuals don’t have a reputation for genocide, whereas governments certainly do.
    - brainwad 8y ago
      Individuals who owned a lot of property definitely could. It's just a matter of degree, not a fundamental difference between individuals and government.
      - pmiller2 8y ago
        Also consider that said “individuals” may be corporations.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Meh. On the one hand, I'm against tracking everyone, everywhere. On the other hand, I'm totally for ALPRs dispensing indiscriminate justice on people violating speed limits. I wish we could have auditable, trustworthy ALPR boxes that only report speed violations to be immediately turned into tickets, and don't store license plate numbers of people who follow the law.

Jmcdd 8y ago
Don't forget stolen, untaxed, and uninsured vehicles too
adrianN 8y ago
I really don't understand why we don't enforce speed limits more rigorously. We have the technology to do this at basically zero cost and speeding is one of the main causes of death on the road. Especially in residential areas where pedestrians and cyclists are around even moderate speeding dramatically increases the chances of deadly accidents. Doing 30mph instead of 20mph increases the chance of death for pedestrians from 5% to 45%. [1] [1] http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm
- saagarjha 8y ago
  The real issue I have is that speed limits are selectively and arbitrarily enforced. This basically means that most people just end up breaking the law anyways and it allows law enforcement a convenient excuse to find a reason to fault someone.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > Doing 30mph instead of 20mph increases the chance of death for pedestrians from 5% to 45%. What is this metric supposed to imply though? We obviously have roads with limits above 30mph already, so clearly decisions aren't made based on merely chance-of-death-assuming-a-collision being too high.
  - mprev 8y ago

Jmcdd 8y ago

Looks like the US is getting ANPR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recog...

BrentOzar 8y ago
Big US cities have had mobile license plate readers for a while: https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/13/cpd-license-plate-readers/ https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/13/cpd-license-plate-re... Just not coordinated at the national level yet. It would be pretty expensive given the size of the country, the number of police vehicles involved, and the current cost per vehicle.

reacweb 8y ago

There are a lot of burglaries in France. The recognition of license plates combined with mobile phone location information would make it possible to identify burglars and even catch them in the act. All the data are available, it would be sufficient to collect them for analysis.

INTPenis 8y ago

I hope it is, that's where I'd put the camera if I was in charge. Makes a lot of sense. Only problem with that theory is that regular speed trap cameras are designed to be easily managed. Easily washed and easily replaced. So the end result is a big almost tower-like structure that in my country sometimes is empty depending on where they've deployed the actual camera, which sits inside this tower. So placing a seemingly hidden camera inside a digital sign has some challenges. Like for example servicability and cleaning. Cars produce a lot of grit so having a large lens area that is easily cleaned actually helps. They also work at night by using flash, which also requires some structure that might be visible.

TomMarius 8y ago

It doesn't sometimes?

loser777 8y ago

Enforcing speed when the intent is public safety rather than revenue generation requires more nuance than what the current system in the US has to offer. Does it make sense to strictly enforce a 20 or 25 mph limit in areas with residential/pedestrian traffic? Certainly, especially given that pedestrians crossing a street are essentially at a 25 mph speed difference relative to perpendicular traffic. But if we apply this arithmetic to semi trailers traveling at 65 mph on the highway, a 25 mph difference would suggest a speed limit of 90 mph, even neglecting the safety difference in a vehicle-vehicle collision. Where are most current speeding tickets issued? Is it in low-speed, residential areas where drivers know that an extra 5 mph won't save them any time at all (and would greatly increase the risk of injury in an accident)? Or is it in high-speed straights on the highway where an extra 15 mph can save you hours on long trips (where a speed limit effectively grandfathered from the malaise era still applies)? Another consideration: if speed enforcement on highways was so critical to public safety, why are radar detectors and even laser jammers legal in many US jurisdictions? My perception is that physics-based policy decisions never get far in the US system. Ultimately, automated enforcement/better technology seems orthogonal to the policy problem. We should get the policy right first.

imgabe 8y ago
> Is it in low-speed, residential areas where drivers know that an extra 5 mph won't save them any time at all (and would greatly increase the risk of injury in an accident)? Based on my personal experience in such areas, drivers very much do not know this. The number of people speeding down residential streets in my city just to get to a red light at the end of a block is astonishing.
- Chris_Chambers 8y ago
  What city?
fyfy18 8y ago
For a comparison, the other week I drove 4000km across Europe and most of the speed cameras I came across were in areas where the speed actually makes a difference i.e. in towns and residential areas. Along a three lane motorway it doesn’t make much difference whether you go at 130kmh or 160kmh, if you aren’t paying attention and do something stupid it’s going to end badly either way. From seeing where speed was actually enforced, it seems that the authorities here believe that too.

jobigoud 8y ago

With advances in technology, the trend is that we are more and more able to catch speeding, red light passing, and other infractions. And it turns out a lot of people are eventually doing some. I'm wondering what would be the consequences of a truly omniscient system, where each and every infraction would be immediately caught. We could maybe have mandatory black boxes in vehicles that transmit the infraction in real time. It seems with a truly complete system, every driver would eventually run out of points on their license and wouldn't be allowed to drive anymore.

ryanmarsh 8y ago
I started asking my family over ten years ago: What do you imagine life will be like when a super high resolution camera with terabytes of storage that can run on a solar cell costs $5? Because that’s where we’re headed.
btrettel 8y ago
I don't think following the rules of the road the vast majority of the time is that hard. Yes, you will make mistakes from time to time, but any reasonable system would recognize that. And sometimes following the law is less safe, but that's extremely rare in my experience. The problem is that many drivers, if not the majority of drivers, have no problem intentionally breaking the law as it suits them (e.g., speeding, unsafe passing, etc.). I am a cyclist who rides with a helmet camera. It's amazing how much this seems to change some drivers' behavior. One moment they're rude and/or dangerous, the next they are keeping their distance and driving the speed limit. These drivers choose to drive dangerously because they think it saves time. (I'd argue the time savings are much smaller than they believe.) These people are the ones I think an automated system would catch, and I have no problem with that. (As a cyclist, I follow the law to the letter, by the way. You will not catch me running reds. In fact, I have gone through the local police's stop sign enforcement efforts twice and passed.)

ryanmarsh 8y ago

There’s RFID antennas everywhere grabbing your toll tag number. Frankly this is a drop in the ocean of much more precise and voluminous data gathering on you. This one is the least of my worries.

dzdt 8y ago

The "Vigilant" database mentioned is actually a product of a private company. There is essentially zero limitation or oversight on what they do with license plate data. From the point of view of the law, there is no expectation of privacy on a public street. One of their main customer bases are people who "recover" vehicles where the buyer is not keeping up with loan payments. They have thousands of private cameras in operation, making an ever expanding private dragnet available to anyone with the money to buy the data.

bradfa 8y ago

Your car likely gets its picture taken, and probably license plate automatically read, every time you drive through a toll booth, too. No one seems to be outraged over toll booths doing this, so why should any other public road sign (or private road sign that you, the driver, don't own) be any different? Don't like being tracked by YOUR plate? Find other ways to achieve your transportation goals: ride a bike, take the bus, walk, use a taxi and pay cash, borrow a car, etc. Sure, you could be tracked by facial recognition but that's a lot harder to do currently than reading some very well defined characters from a highly visible license plate and it's much easier to legally change your appearance than to change your plate.

maxerickson 8y ago
The ACLU says Any entity that uses license plate readers should be required to report. https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac... That kind of sounds inclusive of toll booths.
- ectospheno 8y ago
  Their 5 desired behaviors are admirable. The 2nd item, "The government must not store data about innocent people for any lengthy period." is hard to implement given existing police department budgets. The only way for you to know you can delete is to perform an investigation to verify you can delete. Doing that every few months on each plate isn't reasonable. You could speed up the process by having a national database but I imagine they would be even less happy about that. I love the ACLU. I donate monthly. I fear a US without the ACLU far more than I fear a US with the ACLU. But every now and then I don't think they have completely thought out the opposing point of view or the realities of time and money.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    I don't understand your logic. Why can't they just delete any information that isn't part of an active investigation? Because they don't want to take any heat from pro-authoritarians in the case that a later investigation could have used the evidence? In the past police departments have been happy enough to just ignore rape kits for years and years. I guess people would flip their shit if unprocessed rape kits were destroyed, but that's specific evidence...