4 ms·

There is a reason you can’t just plug in anyone’s vehicle license plate and get their name and address.

by teeray 5y ago

Breza 5y ago
You also can't drive your car onto my property without permission. There are valid reasons for a drone to do exactly that, and I'd like to know who is looking at my house. It would be nice to Google a drone ID and realize that it's just the power company looking for branches that might take down a power line.
dredmorbius 5y ago
The information is widely, if not (yet) universally, available. https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...
- Teever 5y ago
  Sounds like we need to fix that with regulation too?
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    I'd be on board with that.
- ILMostro7 5y ago
  that's not quite the same thing, as it doesn't provide "name and adress", no?
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Considerably more than for those with access. Again: once an identifier is available, correlating it with other information is trivial.
    - ILMostro7 5y ago
      Thanks for your input. I'm sincerely asking out of ignorance and curiosity around these things.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        A fairly classical example of readily de-anonimisable data is location, at postal-code resolution. With nothing more than two postal codes (ZIP codes in the US), representing home and work, it's possible to individually identify about 90% of the population. That information is available via, say, geocoded location using mobile phone or tracking cookie data.[1] In the case of device or vehicle tracking such as with drones, it's highly likely that a given device would be used within a particular jurisdiction or activity region. If you can pinpoint specific locations and times within those (e.g., police activity around an address + drone activity, activity following specific infrastructure such as power lines or gas distribution, training locations, etc., etc.) you can probably come up with a strong idea of who operates or owns the equipment. That is more-or-less the process that was used to identify CIA-operated aircraft used in renditions for "enhanced interrogation" (torture) by amateur plane watchers. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_aircraft https://web.archive.org/web/20130616175922/http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0320-04.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20130616175922/http://www.common... ________________________________ Notes: 1. The home+work ZIP anecdote is the one I recall. I'm not finding that specifically though this paper mentions four spatio-temporal locations sufficing for 95% of the population: Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blondel, "Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility", Scientific Reports volume 3, Article number: 1376 (2013) https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376
th3typh00n 5y ago
In some European countries you can in fact do exactly that. Useful if you need to ask someone to move their vehicle for example. I'm sure there's some kind of hypothetical downside, but not one that me or anyone I know have encountered at least.

There is a reason you can’t just plug in anyone’s vehicle license plate and get their name and address.

by teeray 5y ago

There is a reason you can’t just plug in anyone’s vehicle license plate and get their name and address.

You also can't drive your car onto my property without permission. There are valid reasons for a drone to do exactly that, and I'd like to know who is looking at my house. It would be nice to Google a drone ID and realize that it's just the power company looking for branches that might take down a power line.

dredmorbius 5y ago

The information is widely, if not (yet) universally, available. https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...

Teever 5y ago
Sounds like we need to fix that with regulation too?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  I'd be on board with that.
ILMostro7 5y ago
that's not quite the same thing, as it doesn't provide "name and adress", no?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Considerably more than for those with access. Again: once an identifier is available, correlating it with other information is trivial.
  - ILMostro7 5y ago
    Thanks for your input. I'm sincerely asking out of ignorance and curiosity around these things.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      A fairly classical example of readily de-anonimisable data is location, at postal-code resolution. With nothing more than two postal codes (ZIP codes in the US), representing home and work, it's possible to individually identify about 90% of the population. That information is available via, say, geocoded location using mobile phone or tracking cookie data.[1] In the case of device or vehicle tracking such as with drones, it's highly likely that a given device would be used within a particular jurisdiction or activity region. If you can pinpoint specific locations and times within those (e.g., police activity around an address + drone activity, activity following specific infrastructure such as power lines or gas distribution, training locations, etc., etc.) you can probably come up with a strong idea of who operates or owns the equipment. That is more-or-less the process that was used to identify CIA-operated aircraft used in renditions for "enhanced interrogation" (torture) by amateur plane watchers. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_aircraft https://web.archive.org/web/20130616175922/http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0320-04.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20130616175922/http://www.common... ________________________________ Notes: 1. The home+work ZIP anecdote is the one I recall. I'm not finding that specifically though this paper mentions four spatio-temporal locations sufficing for 95% of the population: Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blondel, "Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility", Scientific Reports volume 3, Article number: 1376 (2013) https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376

th3typh00n 5y ago

In some European countries you can in fact do exactly that. Useful if you need to ask someone to move their vehicle for example. I'm sure there's some kind of hypothetical downside, but not one that me or anyone I know have encountered at least.