9 ms·

Traffic cameras can read and track license plate numbers, how is that private?

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Depends on what they're built out to do. Highway traffic monitoring cameras don't (and usually aren't placed for a good angle to see them), toll enforcement cameras obviously do. Speed warnings signs are generally not cameras, I think, but radar, and hence don't. Also, only the government can generally turn a plate number into a person's identity reliably (I doubt Google knows my license plate, though I'd be interested to know if they did), and even then, a license plate is far less likely to always identify a given person's movements than their phone's GPS.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  Widespread government owned CCTV cameras have been widely recognized as a privacy threat, and you only need to look at countries outside the US to see how they are being used for license plate AND face tracking. Speed cameras in the US aren't just radar, they photograph you, and even mail you a photo of yourself when you're caught speeding. This has lead to famous cases, like when a guy was caught speeding, and his home was mailed a speeding ticket of him in the car with his mistress, which his wife opened the mail. Seems to me you're now hand waving away the long recognized danger of government surveillance, as in, actual danger, wherein government sanctions you based on surveillance, as opposed to theoretical dangers of someone showing you a Nike ad. So while you're worrying about GDPR, this is happening: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-surveillance-facial-recognition-technology/ https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-sur...
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    Next year I can vote to remove the misogynist in charge of the United States, and hopefully replace him with someone better. (And even if I fail, he's gone in just another four years.) However, even Google's shareholders can't remove the misogynists in charge of Google due to the share class structure. The government has problems but trends towards the people's benefit in the long run. Corporate greed trends towards enriching the lives of sick and disturbing rich men like Larry and Sergey. Corporations are a far worse and far less regulated threat than government, with far less checks and balances in place to protect us. Throwing out the government bogeyman hasn't worked on me before and isn't going to work on me now.
    - cromwellian 7y ago
      >The government has problems but trends towards the people's benefit in the long run. Corporate greed trends towards enriching the lives of sick and disturbing rich men like Larry and Sergey. >Corporations are a far worse and far less regulated threat than government, with far less checks and balances in place to protect us. Tell that to the victims of US foreign policy. 1+ million Iraqis dead, ethnic cleansing civil war, and the unleashing of a theocratic cult recently is just the tip of the iceberg. Do I really need to add up all the dead in South America, in South East Asia, and around the world from your "mostly benign, government has problems but trends towards benefit" scenario? Maybe YOUR benefit, but you've been privileged to export misery and suffering to other people around the world. I tell you what, go visit the war museum in Hanoi, and gaze at the deformed children who are still affected today by Agent Orange, or those still being blow up by land mines and other unexploded ordinance. This is the sad navel gazing of the privileged and comfortable, hyperbolizing theoretical threats and getting triggered over minutiae, and hand waving away the utter misery and very real dangers that have been shown over and over this century. This is not to assert "whataboutism" and claim that privacy isn't important, it is. But trying to argue that ad targeting is the greater threat than US (government), when our foreign policy's stacks of bodies piled miles high strikes me as naive.
      - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
        > Maybe YOUR benefit, but you've been privileged to export misery and suffering to other people around the world. This is exactly what I would say about someone cozily working at Google in Silicon Valley. I literally deal with the costs imposed on seniors and less technically literate users by Google's ad nightmare on a daily basis. And before you get high and mighty about how bad the government is compared to Google, remember that Google is built upon and protected by that very same government, and that Google's NetPAC is actively contributing chunks of many Googler paychecks (perhaps even yours?) to fund the very worst members of that government: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164945275066056704 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164945275066056704
        cromwellian 7y ago
- skybrian 7y ago
  This isn't all that reassuring because it's easy enough to record license plates and figure out who they belong to later. It's like the bad ways of releasing an "anonymized" dataset that differential privacy is supposed to fix.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    But again, that's only a problem if you've recorded the plates in the first place. Cameras functioning for live-only view with no recording storage, cameras without a good angle of the front or rear of cars or without the adequate zoom level for readability, or radar-based solutions are all incapable of violating your privacy in a meaningful way.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      All of these are based on trusting the owner of the cameras to not do bad things (they could start recording. How would you know?). Which is no better than with differential privacy (you're trusting them to apply these protections when they say they do). How do you know the cameras aren't recording? How do you know the resolution isn't lowered before being made public? How do you know there aren't other cameras that aren't made public? If you're going to use a threat model that assumes malice on a "trusted" organization, you should do so for all such organizations: whether they be google or a government. It's only if you assume google isn't trustworthy, but governments are, that your threat model makes sense. If you don't make that particular set of assumptions (and even if you do in many cases!) differential privacy is a net win.
      - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
        > they could start recording. How would you know? FOIA. That falls into the whole part where government has checks and balances that Google does not.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        So you trust the foia process? How many years do you have? How much money? Do you know the right questions to ask? How are those FOIA requests for stingray usage and tracking information going? Still blocked, last I checked. Like I keep saying: these arguments only work if you assume that the usg is all sunshine and rainbows, which is a naive assumption to make. If you're willing to call NetPAC bad, which you do, you've got to agree that it's only bad if the people taking money do so and support the $badthings you claim google does, by not outlawing them. But if they're corrupt enough to do that, why aren't they corrupt enough to torpedo a few FOIA requests? To put it another way if google is so bad, and you can't even get the USG to police google, how can you expect them to police themselves?
cromwellian 7y ago
https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac...

Depends on what they're built out to do. Highway traffic monitoring cameras don't (and usually aren't placed for a good angle to see them), toll enforcement cameras obviously do. Speed warnings signs are generally not cameras, I think, but radar, and hence don't. Also, only the government can generally turn a plate number into a person's identity reliably (I doubt Google knows my license plate, though I'd be interested to know if they did), and even then, a license plate is far less likely to always identify a given person's movements than their phone's GPS.

cromwellian 7y ago
Widespread government owned CCTV cameras have been widely recognized as a privacy threat, and you only need to look at countries outside the US to see how they are being used for license plate AND face tracking. Speed cameras in the US aren't just radar, they photograph you, and even mail you a photo of yourself when you're caught speeding. This has lead to famous cases, like when a guy was caught speeding, and his home was mailed a speeding ticket of him in the car with his mistress, which his wife opened the mail. Seems to me you're now hand waving away the long recognized danger of government surveillance, as in, actual danger, wherein government sanctions you based on surveillance, as opposed to theoretical dangers of someone showing you a Nike ad. So while you're worrying about GDPR, this is happening: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-surveillance-facial-recognition-technology/ https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-sur...
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Next year I can vote to remove the misogynist in charge of the United States, and hopefully replace him with someone better. (And even if I fail, he's gone in just another four years.) However, even Google's shareholders can't remove the misogynists in charge of Google due to the share class structure. The government has problems but trends towards the people's benefit in the long run. Corporate greed trends towards enriching the lives of sick and disturbing rich men like Larry and Sergey. Corporations are a far worse and far less regulated threat than government, with far less checks and balances in place to protect us. Throwing out the government bogeyman hasn't worked on me before and isn't going to work on me now.
  - cromwellian 7y ago
    >The government has problems but trends towards the people's benefit in the long run. Corporate greed trends towards enriching the lives of sick and disturbing rich men like Larry and Sergey. >Corporations are a far worse and far less regulated threat than government, with far less checks and balances in place to protect us. Tell that to the victims of US foreign policy. 1+ million Iraqis dead, ethnic cleansing civil war, and the unleashing of a theocratic cult recently is just the tip of the iceberg. Do I really need to add up all the dead in South America, in South East Asia, and around the world from your "mostly benign, government has problems but trends towards benefit" scenario? Maybe YOUR benefit, but you've been privileged to export misery and suffering to other people around the world. I tell you what, go visit the war museum in Hanoi, and gaze at the deformed children who are still affected today by Agent Orange, or those still being blow up by land mines and other unexploded ordinance. This is the sad navel gazing of the privileged and comfortable, hyperbolizing theoretical threats and getting triggered over minutiae, and hand waving away the utter misery and very real dangers that have been shown over and over this century. This is not to assert "whataboutism" and claim that privacy isn't important, it is. But trying to argue that ad targeting is the greater threat than US (government), when our foreign policy's stacks of bodies piled miles high strikes me as naive.
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      > Maybe YOUR benefit, but you've been privileged to export misery and suffering to other people around the world. This is exactly what I would say about someone cozily working at Google in Silicon Valley. I literally deal with the costs imposed on seniors and less technically literate users by Google's ad nightmare on a daily basis. And before you get high and mighty about how bad the government is compared to Google, remember that Google is built upon and protected by that very same government, and that Google's NetPAC is actively contributing chunks of many Googler paychecks (perhaps even yours?) to fund the very worst members of that government: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164945275066056704 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164945275066056704
      - cromwellian 7y ago
skybrian 7y ago
This isn't all that reassuring because it's easy enough to record license plates and figure out who they belong to later. It's like the bad ways of releasing an "anonymized" dataset that differential privacy is supposed to fix.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  But again, that's only a problem if you've recorded the plates in the first place. Cameras functioning for live-only view with no recording storage, cameras without a good angle of the front or rear of cars or without the adequate zoom level for readability, or radar-based solutions are all incapable of violating your privacy in a meaningful way.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    All of these are based on trusting the owner of the cameras to not do bad things (they could start recording. How would you know?). Which is no better than with differential privacy (you're trusting them to apply these protections when they say they do). How do you know the cameras aren't recording? How do you know the resolution isn't lowered before being made public? How do you know there aren't other cameras that aren't made public? If you're going to use a threat model that assumes malice on a "trusted" organization, you should do so for all such organizations: whether they be google or a government. It's only if you assume google isn't trustworthy, but governments are, that your threat model makes sense. If you don't make that particular set of assumptions (and even if you do in many cases!) differential privacy is a net win.
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      > they could start recording. How would you know? FOIA. That falls into the whole part where government has checks and balances that Google does not.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        So you trust the foia process? How many years do you have? How much money? Do you know the right questions to ask? How are those FOIA requests for stingray usage and tracking information going? Still blocked, last I checked. Like I keep saying: these arguments only work if you assume that the usg is all sunshine and rainbows, which is a naive assumption to make. If you're willing to call NetPAC bad, which you do, you've got to agree that it's only bad if the people taking money do so and support the $badthings you claim google does, by not outlawing them. But if they're corrupt enough to do that, why aren't they corrupt enough to torpedo a few FOIA requests? To put it another way if google is so bad, and you can't even get the USG to police google, how can you expect them to police themselves?

cromwellian 7y ago

https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-are-being-tracked https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac...