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The 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.
by Rygian 4y ago
The 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.
- cronix 4y agoPermits? We're not talking a solar farm to power a small device. There are a lot of trail cams that have solar built in, are very small, camouflaged, and motion activated with 20MP cameras for under $200.
- 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