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Traffic cameras expose your location through parking apps
- Rygian 4y agoThe gist of it: I can subscribe to location updates for any license plate that I want, without knowledge or consent from the owner of that car.
- londons_explore 4y agoSomething you could do anyway with a network of $50 android phones mounted on bridges over freeways. But this way you don't have to pay for the cameras - someone else has done it for you.
- Sebb767 4y agoYou'd need to place those, maintain them, prevent vandalism, route power to them, pay for network connectivity and weather-proof them. The price of the cameras is not the problem.
- londons_explore 4y agoI will place and maintain road cameras for $50/yr, including data connectivity for plates. Minimum 1,000 cameras. 75% uptime/scan rate guarantee.
- xnorswap 4y agoYou'd likely lose a lot of money trying to do that, you're vastly underestimating the cost of maintaining the data network for that kind of installation alone, even before looking at the cost of physical installation.
- londons_explore 4y agoIf it's a bargain, take me up on the offer then.
- uoaei 4y agoThat's not how the market works.
- n4r9 4y agoIt absolutely is a bargain. I don't have the money or time to risk but I strongly recommend that you start a company, build a website and advertise your service to the world. I'm assuming you'll also deal with any regulatory and data protection issues, get permission from local authorities etc... . You've found an astonishing gap in the market, it seems.
- gus_massa 4y ago> get permission from local authorities For some reason I guess the business plan was about forgetting to get the permits...
- generalizations 4y agoOk, I'll bite. How would you do that? How do they stay connected and powered?
- mschuster91 4y agoSolar panels, probably.
- dagw 4y agoYou'll either have to do this guerrilla style, in which case solar panels will be far too obvious. Or you'll have to apply for all relevant permits, in which case you'll never get them.
- 4y ago
- kspacewalk2 4y agoWhy do you think any city in any Western country will allow you to pepper public property with thousands of surveillance devices?
- dylan604 4y agoRight, gov't doesn't like competition
- arethuza 4y ago"I will place and maintain" I suspect a lot of that $50,000 a year would get burned getting a single camera installed.
- nisegami 4y agoOnly if you do it legally
- dagw 4y agoWhat does your SLA look like? Do I get to pick the roads? And when do I get my $50k back when you fail to deliver?
- londons_explore 4y agoSLA: 75% of the cars that pass will be captured. The 25% covers equipment failure/theft/service outage/etc. This applies to the whole set, not per camera. We mutually agree the roads - but it's unlikely I'll disagree unless you want to place four cameras per country worldwide to maximize logistics difficulties. Half upfront, half when the service has been operating 3 months. Full refund if SLA not met. If you can show you're very solvent, you can pay in arrears instead.
- InCityDreams 4y ago>for $50/yr..... Minimum how many years? I see software doesn't seem to be incuded. Also, your numbers sound like you like to bid for government contracts.
- londons_explore 4y ago1 year minimum (my breakeven point is 8 months optimistically, 12 months more realistically, and the profit comes from either you continuing the contract past 12 months or from someone else contracting me for the same cameras).
- runlevel1 4y agoFor reference: Speed cameras have an annual operating cost of ~$30,000/year.[1] [1]: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/governor-cites-research-speed-cameras-policy https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
- m463 4y agoI suspect speed cameras have to produce results that are verifiable in court, while ALPR cameras just best-effort help locate cars.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago$1000 per yr in actual op cost. $29000 p/y to pay the contracted company to say it's $30k. Of course I'm exaggerating. But at the same time gov is not known for being efficient + effective.
- weberer 4y agoI know Philadelphia has a network of publicly accessible traffic cameras that were installed by the city. I assume other places have them too.
- xnyanta 4y agoQuebec has the same: https://quebec511.info https://quebec511.info
- arethuza 4y agoI thought those kind of networks were pretty common - here is Scotland's: https://trafficscotland.org/map/index.aspx?type=26 https://trafficscotland.org/map/index.aspx?type=26
- dagw 4y agoThose cameras are placed in such a way and have a low enough resolution that it is impossible to read the license plates from the public data.
- arethuza 4y agoFair point, you can almost read number plates on some of the cameras that are close to roads. Presumably the cameras are capturing data at a higher resolution than those public images?
- londons_explore 4y agoI'd bet with a bit of data processing on that video feed (subpixel aligning and stacking all the frames, using the prior knowledge that you know the numberplate isn't changing as the car drives down the road), you'd be able to read them.
- arethuza 4y agoYeah - I was squinting at some of them thinking that the appropriate tech could probably read them.
- conradev 4y agoNot sure why this is being downvoted, it is an actual thing: “Several companies operate independent, non-law enforcement ALPR databases, contracting with drivers to put cameras on private vehicles to collect the information.” https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al... Motherboard did a deeper dive on one of them: “DRN is a private surveillance system crowdsourced by hundreds of repo men who have installed cameras that passively scan, capture, and upload the license plates of every car they drive by to DRN's database. DRN stretches coast to coast and is available to private individuals and companies focused on tracking and locating people or vehicles.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-wit...
- milesvp 4y agoTo further this, I know someone who was a public defender a decade ago in the US. They would regularly try to get intersection camera footage to attempt to prove their clients not guilty. Often it was impossible to track down who owned the cameras, or even if they were municiple or private. I imagine this has only gotten worse as cameras have gotten cheaper.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- QuarterReptile 4y agoTape over lens and watch who comes out? I am very much not a lawyer.
- londons_explore 4y agoI'd bet half the time nobody will come out. So many systems are legacy and entirely unused, or best effort - ie. if the camera is working, it'll be used, but nobody will be sent to repair it if it's broken.
- schainks 4y ago
- shiftpgdn 4y agoNot even close. Cars on a freeway are doing 10 to 100mph. To capture a plate on a moving car you need less than 1" of movement during the exposure time. At 10mph a car is moving at 176 inches per second, and to be able to read the plate with less than 1" of movement you need a camera that has a shutter speed of 176th of a second, or rounded up at 1/200th . To capture at 100mph a vehicle is moving at 1760 inches per second. To read the plate you'll need a camera that can capture at 1760th of a second, or rounded up to 1/2000. I don't know of any android phones that can capture both at 1/2000th and video on a second camera at the same time to know when to fire the first camera.
- anon_cow1111 4y agoYou assumed the camera was capturing a photo of the car viewed from the side where the full speed is apparent (and ironically where the plate will not even be visible). Most cameras point down the length of the road and the "speed" that the camera sees is only a fraction of that. You can record a video with a merely-ok phone and probably see most plate numbers assuming the lighting isn't terrible. Good luck getting a phone camera to work at night with an LED flash though (oh and also, this assumes you want to catch people speeding, to capture every plate number you would just put the camera near a slow area like a bend or stop sign)
- shiftpgdn 4y agoI assure you the motion blur, even looking down the same plane (parallel) to the car will not be able to capture the plate, even in decent light on video alone. Go try to take video yourself of a car driving by in full daylight.
- londons_explore 4y agoThe obvious approach is to just train your numberplate recognition algorithm with blurred plates. Since the blur is almost equal across the whole plate, and nearly all cars are moving in the same direction, you aren't really losing much information. Sure, it might be hard for a human to read, but for a deep learning algorithm I don't think it's actually any harder. But there are other approaches too - like putting a 99 cent novelty zoom lens on the front of your camera to capture more light for your region of interest, allowing you to use shorter exposure times. Or an infrared strobe light that flashes once per frame (most numberplates are retroreflective, so IR strobes work really well).
- anigbrowl 4y ago'Something you could do anyway' with something that would actually cost a huge amount of money and effort to build (those $50 phones probably wouldn't have adequate cameras, and would still need to be supplied power by solar panels or something, not to mention being subject to removal).
- samstave 4y agodid you know that the city of Menlo Park california requires companies to have cameras which can see for miles and track and report all vehicles that drive by them.... look up the largest company in menlo park...
- m463 4y agoa friend of mine told me - a few years ago - that BART had >4k cameras everywhere. He thought it might be enough to see fingerprints.
- scrumbledober 4y agoIf only they put that effort towards... any other aspect of BART...
- samstave 4y ago
- QuarterReptile 4y agoThe main reason people would downvote your comment is form, not content. And, if it's the content, it's probably because you raised your legitimate complaints to a tone of hysteria.
- scrumbledober 4y agoalso complaining about the workers going on strike like the workers on BART are the reason it sucks...
- nemothekid 4y agoBART has it's problems, but the reason why BART isn't on the level of east asian rail infrastructure has little to do with BART.
- 4y ago
- mdrzn 4y agoIt could be easily fixed by having to get a physical OTP from an automated kiosk in the car park to add the license plate to the app.
- vishnugupta 4y agoAt this point I’m carrying so many electronic devices with me or at home that I’ve give up on going out of my way to prevent getting tracked. My best effort is to trust Apple doesn’t sell me out.
- izacus 4y agoWhat does Apple have to do with it here? The apps on your Apple device are exfiltrating data left and right every day - including parking apps which are the topic of this post. Megacorporations aren't going to save you from this one. Actually creating regulation that will define where you're data is allowed to go (and stay) might.
- dereg 4y agoI don’t think you (nor parent) read the actual post. 1. The problem presented is not that parking apps exfiltrate data from your phone, it’s that anyone can throw your plate number into it and get notified of when you pass through specific areas. 2. Your solution would not address the problem. Problem is not one of data portability, but the fact that your license plate may be registered in a system without your consent or awareness. The convenience of the service is directly at odds with privacy/security, and the post is asserting that the gain in convenience achieved through the current implementation is not worth the perils of the unfettered tracking possible through it. It provides non-governmental solutions to ameliorate the issue.
- ezfe 4y agoApple has all the data at full precision. The few apps that are selling my data get the scraps of a Wi-Fi SSID here or there, and an IP address every once in a while. This is how Apple comes into it.
- raspyberr 4y agoInspiring
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago> At this point I’m carrying so many electronic devices with me or at home that I’ve give up on going out of my way to prevent getting tracked As much as I hate the guy, Kissinger made a great point in an interview with Eric Schmidt paraphrased: 'We have lived a fairly peaceful period in the last century with a stable world order, we should not assume that this is guaranteed to continue forever.' We usually don't like to think in centuries or decades. But a democratic state today can become autocratic 50 years from now. Equally, today caring about my privacy is just adding a lot of friction to me daily live. 50 years from now, I have no guarantee that myself or someone in my family becomes 'a person of interest' for my government.
- kleiba 4y agoAs long as privacy is not a granted right that enables you to sue offenders, there's not much you can do. The EU has at least started to realize the issue but giving the speed of technology vs. the pace of administration, it might be a losing battle.
- arbitrage 4y agoRights grant you the ability to sue others? Interesting take.
- matthewmcg 4y agoSue others or the government. A right without a remedy isn't really a useful right.
- pc86 4y agoI mean, it makes sense. If you have the "right" to $THING, but you have no redress if someone denies you $THING, you don't really have a right to it.
- aqfamnzc 4y agoFor violating those rights? Yeah, I would think so...
- kwhitefoot 4y agoThe use of dash cams is effectively illegal in Austria on privacy grounds: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/152064/are-dash-cams-illegal-in-austria https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/152064/are-dash-c...
- genewitch 4y agohilariously, most dashcams don't have the optical fidelity to read plates consistently anyhow.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
- Gigachad 4y agoJust another reason to preference walking and cycling.
- hunterb123 4y agoA bike is a great mode of transportation when you don't need to carry anything heavy, bulky, passengers etc. and when weather permits. It's not a replacement for a vehicle, nor will it ever be.
- drsim 4y agoNarrow thinking. Cargo bikes come in a variety of shapes and sizes to carry children, adults, parcels, moving boxes, and more. As for the weather... well, as we say in Denmark: there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.
- mattw2121 4y agoDenmark - max temp 72F/22C Florida - max temp 100F/38C Have fun biking in Florida, unless there is a shower ready for you at each end.
- acdha 4y agoIf you're doing something dressy, you need that shower anyway unless you're never spending more than a couple of minutes outside — or you dress appropriately for the weather and it's not an issue. Florida is also an interesting example given that it's both the southernmost point of the continental United States and at significant risk of catastrophic damages from the climate change caused in no small part by driving cars. Whether or not you prefer the status quo, continuing it isn't an option.
- ioslipstream 4y ago
- TacticalCoder 4y ago> Certain tollroad systems, such as France's Bip & Go télépéage, require a physical Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag to be present in the car for authentication purposes. Only if you want to pass the toll / "télépéage" without having to stop for paying "manually" (using a credit card of whatever). I've got one and now you can pass most tolls without stopping (but you need to slow down to about 30 km/h // 20 mph).
- skywhopper 4y agoTransponders (not sure if it’s RFID per se) are common on toll highways in the US and can operate at full highway speeds. But at least with the system I’m familiar with (I-Pass in the Chicago area), if your transponder is broken or missing, they will correlate your license plate to your account via photo.
- mig39 4y agoI recently took a Spanish rental car to Portugal for more than a month. I registered the license plate number and a credit card on the Portuguese tolls website. I then used a bunch of toll highways that were "electronic only" and received the appropriate charges on my credit card a few days later. I think if you're going to set up a toll system in the future, then this is the tech you're going to use. Not RFID or transponders. Just read the license plate and charge the user. There were options, BTW, to pay in cash, with pre-paid cards, etc, that didn't directly tie your identity to the plate. But I assume the rental agency will tie me to the plate, so used my credit card anyway.
- rootusrootus 4y ago> I think if you're going to set up a toll system in the future, then this is the tech you're going to use. Not RFID or transponders. Just read the license plate and charge the user. In my experience any tolling system set up in the past decade is this way. No worries about transponders, they just have a bunch of cameras over the lanes and then send you a bill. Works even for out-of-state plates.
- tluyben2 4y agoI remember the police claiming they had this tech (license plate recognition) for average speed tracking while it did not work. It also didn’t work but was claimed to work for some toll roads. It helped as people slowed down and paid toll but it didn’t work; it started working years after installing it.
- tluyben2 4y agoI am not supposed to ask on HN but why the downvotes? It’s just an observation from the past (Over 20 years ago)?
- anigbrowl 4y agoIt's self-contradictory and hard to understand.
- tluyben2 4y agoHow self contradictory? Most people believed it worked and slowed down, but driving too fast never got you fined because it didn’t actually recognise your number plate. Unlike normal speed cams which were manual at the time.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoAs soon as you put a huge identification plate on your vehicle there’s no expectation of privacy.
- giantg2 4y agoThat depends. We could set standards for what information is linked to that plate and to whom it is accessible. (My state actually has a standard for some info which should not be tied to a plate, but they do it anyways. But nobody is going to stop them. I brought it up to the AG's office, but they were complete idiots about it) One could also set up an anonymous LLC and register the vehicle that way if they really cared.
- notmyplateslol 4y agoI didn't put them on there, they already were there when I picked the car up. And every time I try taking them off people get angry at me.
- makeitdouble 4y agoThere’s always a point where the amount of data makes it a different thing altogether. Like the difference between hearing random strangers talking on the street, and have a full record of everything that person said outside their home for the past 5 years.
- tremon 4y agoThat's the reason you only ever leave your house in a niqaab, I gather?
- daoist_shaman 4y agoAs soon as you’re birthed in a hospital and issued a birth certificate there’s no expectation of privacy. Unless you’re an off-the-grid baby [0]. [0] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-have-an-unregistered-off-the-grid-no-birth-certificate-baby-in-the-USA https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-have-an-unregistered-of...
- avian 4y agoIn my country, the EasyPark app seems to have taken a lot of the market. Almost every parking space I see now has it as an option, including spaces owned by the city. Thankfully, they currently still support paying with cash, but machines often don't return change and only accept coins, so they can be inconvenient. It's shocking to compare the privacy aspect of the app: instead of anonymously throwing some coins into a machine and putting a slip on your dashboard, the app needs: your phone number, your plate number, your credit card details and full GPS access. They're not hiding this: It's explained in their GDPR privacy notice that they track and store your phone location and travel routes even when you're not using a parking space. On top of that, you also pay more for parking when using the app, since they take some percentage commission of the parking cost (apparently depending on your account options, but I never got far enough with the app to find this out)
- fubbyy 4y agoSame in the UK with RingGo.
- InCityDreams 4y agoUk has gdpr?
- goodcanadian 4y agoYes. All EU law at the time of Brexit remains UK law unless and until it is explicitly revoked/superseded.
- rlpb 4y ago> They're not hiding this: It's explained in their GDPR privacy notice that they track and store your phone location and travel routes even when you're not using a parking space. What you're describing sounds illegal. Under the GDPR they cannot collect personal information that's not strictly required for the service the customer is requesting. Unless they have express permission and the customer isn't denied service for refusing.
- someweirdperson 4y agoFinally. Publish it all. Tracking of every vehicle, visible for everyone. It has been that way with aircraft for a long time. Pilots, however, are such a minority that noone really cares. Now that everyone is impacted, regulation might get updated (or someone might spend the time to identify existing regulation that prohibits this), and that would extend to other vehicles than those with wheels.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoyep! There are so many people thinking "I did nothing wrong, who cares if I get tracked".... publish it all, and then have all the neighbours have access to that, the wife can see when you left the bar, your boss can see when you left, etc... only then will people be aware that it's not ok to do that. There are also laws (not sure if accepted yet) that all cars should have remote shutdowns/blocks.. for "security reasons" (basically police can shut down your car if they want to)... and I'm just waiting for someone to hack the whole system and shut down all the cars around the world just for fun
- is_true 4y agoIdeally other people shouldn't care what you do. But reality is sad
- makeitdouble 4y agoEven beyond nosyness, you might want your elderly parents to stay unaware that you’re checking retirement homes in their area. Or not let your son know you’re working a second job while he’s in college. Privacy is just so important from any angle we put it.
- is_true 4y agoI don't particularly agree with both of your examples, but I share your opinion on the importance of privacy. Citizen surveillance and corruption was the reason I started disliking cameras on public places.
- franga2000 4y agoWould the solution no be to simply allow people to pay for parking twice? There's already nothing stopping you from getting two parking slips at a machine. Just start another parking session for each user and track them independently.
- bambax 4y agoThe DB5 in Goldfinger (1964) had revolving licence plates. A cursory Google search comes up with some shady websites that sell similar tech, but it would be a nice DIY project to make a licence plate screen that can be changed on the fly (e-ink based maybe). Has anyone tried it?
- nopcode 4y agoSWIM has a leaf-shaped magnet that can be demagnetised via remote. You put it on the plate so that it cannot be scanned but if police pulls you over it falls off.
- bjacobt 4y agoWhat about https://reviver.com https://reviver.com ?
- rozab 4y agoThis would be flagged immediately. Law enforcement cameras check the plate against the registered make, model, and colour (which are public record in the UK)
- dylan604 4y agoWhat happens if you paint your car? Are you supposed to inform your gov't?
- tristor 4y agoYes, actually, although generally speaking it's not widely enforced. Generally you won't get caught as long as the color on the registration matches the factory color in the VIN database, but you are supposed to ensure the vehicle description is accurate when you renew your registration and providing false information is a criminal offense, so if the color changes, you should update your vehicle registration.
- scrumbledober 4y agoyes
- daoist_shaman 4y agoTheoretically, could this same principle be borrowed by the open source community… to create a database that tracks and updates the location of police, government, military, and high status individual vehicles? I’m thinking of a decentralized, Web3, IPFS-like distributed database, but instead of file storage, it’s real-time geolocation with OSM on the backend.
- Olphs 4y agoYes technically, as long as you know the license plates, but how often do those vehicles park in a commercial places like that? I don't think they do often enough for this kind of tracking to be useful
- daoist_shaman 4y agoGood point. It would become dramatically more useful if netizens just ran license plate scanners on their dashboards that regular report the timestamped geodata of marked/government vehicles.
- pstuart 4y agoThis came up in a thread elsewhere about the severe increase in vehicle thefts in the Portland area. These thefts are not actively investigated by the police, so it would be nice if the owner of a vehicle could get relevant data for the movement/location of the stolen vehicle. Anybody here ever worked with their local PD to get access to the ALPR data? Seems like the work to do it would be more political/bureaucratic than technical.
- hedora 4y agoWe tried and failed, but it was not ALPR data. I came to the conclusion that the data is only available to defend the well connected, or to persecute their enemies (at least in the US). I think the creation of mass tracking databases should be illegal. Barring that, every single person should have equal access to it. (Perhaps gated behind filing a police report and swearing it is correct under penalty of perjury.)
- pstuart 4y agoYeah, the thought was that after filing a police report one could track just the related vehicle. Agreed on the dismal assessments, but those DBs are going to be created and we might as well extract some value as citizens. Would you mind summarizing your attempt and any lessons learned (other than the disappointment mentioned)?
- hedora 4y agoThe details are kind of boring and out of date. We were repeated victims of minor property crimes. The police spent maybe 5-10 officer hours investigating, which is more than I expected. However, they failed to run a (unusual for them, but legal) database search that would have almost certainly identified the culprits. I think they would have done it if the crime was higher priority for them, but ultimately, they need to prioritize their resources on serious crimes and things that make for good public relations / internal politics (like if we were friends with the mayor or something). As the victims, we had every incentive to pursue the investigation, but no legal ability to do so. I'm well aware that our experience was far, far better than is typical in, say SF or Oakland. In our case, they probably would have made an arrest if we had a positive identification of the criminal. That's not really the case everywhere, which is a separate issue.
- slowhand09 4y agoI'm surprised my idea from 10 yrs ago hasn't been monetized. It was an lcd cover that could be made in license plate size, with a remote controller which could dim/darken/blackout the cover. Or in Deluxe mode, activate lines randomly which would result in a different number. Then again... somebody is out front in this technology space. https://www.newsweek.com/what-are-digital-license-plates-how-do-they-work-1717039 https://www.newsweek.com/what-are-digital-license-plates-how...
- green-salt 4y agoI have seen a video of someone doing just this on a car. I'm not sure if it was a commercial product or if it was something they hacked together.
- pol63 4y agoI’m not. You’re describing a spectrum from a traffic ticket in some states (CA will cite you for darkening) to a misdemeanor or even a felony for falsifying or obscuring your license plate. Yes, you can still buy darkeners in the areas they’re illegal, but nobody is going to invest in developing a misdemeanor machine for sale. There’s a difference between a sheet of dark plastic and an engineered device. The digital plates thought of this in their design. You can think of them as frontend UIs for your jurisdiction’s motor vehicle authority, even though a private company is working on them. They will snitch when your tags lapse, both visually and electronically (that’s their purpose), and won’t let you do what you’re proposing if they’re designed correctly.
- mellavora 4y agomaybe because the device could subject both the buyer and the seller to criminal prosecution?
- tmh88j 4y agoI'm not surprised, it sounds illegal for the purpose you described. It's illegal just to own plate flipping devices without even using them in some states. Surely that would be too. > A person commits an offense if the person with criminal negligence uses, purchases, possesses, manufactures, sells, offers to sell, or otherwise distributes a license plate flipper. An offense under this subsection is a Class C misdemeanor, except that the offense is a Class B misdemeanor if the person has previously been convicted of an offense under this subsection. https://law.onecle.com/texas/transportation/504.947.html https://law.onecle.com/texas/transportation/504.947.html
- dublin 4y agoWith the rise of automated license plate readers and tracking databases, we MUST recognize this truth: License Plates Considered Harmful (to privacy and 4th Amendment rights). No, I'm not joking. If we're not going to put serious legal restrictions and penalties on this kind of tracking, the only other viable option is to eliminate license plates entirely. Here in Austin, there is at least one sane City Councilman who is pushing for a maximum 3 minute retention time for license plate scan event data. I expect that would get pushed to 30-180 minutes in reality, but there is no justification for any longer than that...
- julienreszka 4y agoDon't be fooled. The purpose of mass surveillance has always been coercion. If you can't see how this is going to be abused just give it a bit more thought.
- illiac786 4y agoWhat happens if I fill out the form BUT I am an easypark user? Does it delete my account?