5 ms·

Why? Photos in public are First Amendment protected. You can just think things are creepy without being a crime

mikece 3y ago
These aren't photos but collection of PII which is then sold. If I took a photo of you walking your dog and posted it to Instagram that's not even remotely the same as writing down your license plate number and selling it to someone wanting to track you.
- chasd00 3y ago
  in the case of instagram isn't it exactly the same? Instagram is going to process the photo, find out who's in it, then their insta/FB account, and then use their association to you and ads you've clicked to try and figure out an ad to serve to them that's most likely to generate a click. edit: i guess the difference is you're not selling them the picture, you're providing it for free.
  - jakelazaroff 3y ago
    I actually don't think Instagram should be allowed to target ads to me based on other people's photos in which I happen to appear.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Well, it’s remotely similar in that there is absolutely no way either of those things is illegal…
  - InSteady 3y ago
    Never let the archaic and reactionary nature of the legal system become your sole argument in a debate about ethics.
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      Never use the word ethics around a lawyer because we have a completely separate set of professional codes enforced on us which are unhelpfully called “ethics.” You will confuse the lawyer and he or she will lash out irrationally, possibly with an unhelpful or snarky post, even though deep down the lawyer secretly agrees with you.
- bdowling 3y ago
  It depends. If you are a recognizable figure who people with ill intent are trying to find, then public knowledge of where and when you walk your dog is a big problem. On the other hand, if there’s no way to connect a person to a license plate number without access to the DMV database, then that is not obviously an issue.
  - landemva 3y ago
    >> connect a person to a license plate number What I drive are owned by trusts and LLCs, so on paper they are not connected to my driver license nor to me. While I understand that cars are designed to be mobile and therefore easy to move around when stolen, I don't understand the necessity of a big plate with unique numbers. I don't have that on my bicycles. If plates reduce theft, let the insurance companies and manufacturers work that out.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Except California is also notorious for selling access to that DMV database
- tevon 3y ago
  License plates themselves are not PII. They are publicly available data. If the license plate is associated with OTHER PII it becomes a problem. However reading your license plate on the way into and out of a garage is just reading a publicly available code at different times of day. The fact that that code must always be displayed on your vehicle, and can be tied to your identity is an issue, but the code itself doesn't constitute PII.
  - theptip 3y ago
    You’re making a blanket statement here which sounds like a first-principles argument, but in reality it’s nuanced. It seems under GDPR license plate numbers are considered personal data. Not sure about CCPA/CPRA.
  - landemva 3y ago
    >> They are publicly available data. Plate info is not public to average Jane and Joe. In a State in USA I tried to get owner info of a plate marked 'gvt' and was denied because DMV said I'm not a private investigator or something.
- akira2501 3y ago
  We need to get rid of license plates then. They're an inappropriate solution to the technical problem they were invented for now that the internet exists. It used to be that police had limited ways to verify ownership of a vehicle, and a simple state owned database with state issued numbers was a useful tool to solve this problem. Now.. the police have internet connected mobile terminals. I'm not sure a "number plate" is the right solution to any part of this problem anymore.
  - tzs 3y ago
    So say police are looking for someone who is suspected to be in a white Ford Bronco. They see a white Ford Bronco and want to use their internet connected mobile terminal to see if that is the white Ford Bronco they are looking for. Without license plates how are they to tell what that terminal is connect to which white Ford Bronco they are inquiring about? Do they have to actually stop every white Ford Bronco they see so they can read the VIN or get the driver's ID?
    - akira2501 3y ago
      You have several pieces of identification. The suspect description. The vehicle make, model, condition and color. The last known location. The plate numbers. The plate numbers are the least likely to be correct and the least likely mechanism of finding the vehicle in question. The plate number will help you discriminate between two vehicles, but it does not aid in the search. Likewise police helicopters have no problem following specific vehicles even though the plates cannot be read. So, you are imagining a situation where there are two identical suspects that cannot be discriminated from each other using all the above information and it will somehow come down to the plate, and without it, police will be unable to proceed correctly? Is this actually any different from a suspect on foot or a bicycle or skateboard?
petsfed 3y ago
I've said this before elsewhere, but this is precisely the situation where the distinction is important. There's this disease within the tech community where people can't see the harm of scaling things up using automation. Potentially harmful thing X, previously moderated and slowed by the high cost of labor to do it at scale, must not be harmful because we've always technically allowed it, so therefore we should not do anything to moderate it now that robots are doing it for us. "We could run this nuclear reaction at a much faster rate if we just removed the moderator, what could go wrong?"
- akira2501 3y ago
  What is the actual harm here? If you don't pay for the property, and you refuse to work out an agreement with the owner, they are entitled to come get their property. How is there additional harm, at this point, by using ALPRs to find the (effectively) stolen property? It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this. Not quite true. Buy here pay here dealerships and similar are absolutely eager to do this, and will go out of their way to make it onerous to pay what is owed, so they can sell the same 5 year old Kia for $15K multiple times over.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      They also tend to just put a GPS tracker in the car, which seems far more onerous than a repossession agent with an ALPR database at hand.
  - petsfed 3y ago
    There's currently months of effort, in part because of the labor constraints. Its not worth paying a guy with a tow truck to go looking for a car that might not even be there. ALPRs exist to lower that cost of labor, potentially to the point that the lender can still make money sending out the repo guy much sooner than 90 days. I'm not even upset about that. Hell, it might be a net good, I dunno. The thing that I'm concerned about is that there is no guarantee (or even guard rail, really) against selling that data to a law enforcement organization that would otherwise have to undergo judicial scrutiny to get that data. What happens when some hacker gets a hold of their license plate database and uses it for an actual stalking operation? Or who knows what else?

These aren't photos but collection of PII which is then sold. If I took a photo of you walking your dog and posted it to Instagram that's not even remotely the same as writing down your license plate number and selling it to someone wanting to track you.

chasd00 3y ago
in the case of instagram isn't it exactly the same? Instagram is going to process the photo, find out who's in it, then their insta/FB account, and then use their association to you and ads you've clicked to try and figure out an ad to serve to them that's most likely to generate a click. edit: i guess the difference is you're not selling them the picture, you're providing it for free.
- jakelazaroff 3y ago
  I actually don't think Instagram should be allowed to target ads to me based on other people's photos in which I happen to appear.
singleshot_ 3y ago
Well, it’s remotely similar in that there is absolutely no way either of those things is illegal…
- InSteady 3y ago
  Never let the archaic and reactionary nature of the legal system become your sole argument in a debate about ethics.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    Never use the word ethics around a lawyer because we have a completely separate set of professional codes enforced on us which are unhelpfully called “ethics.” You will confuse the lawyer and he or she will lash out irrationally, possibly with an unhelpful or snarky post, even though deep down the lawyer secretly agrees with you.
bdowling 3y ago
It depends. If you are a recognizable figure who people with ill intent are trying to find, then public knowledge of where and when you walk your dog is a big problem. On the other hand, if there’s no way to connect a person to a license plate number without access to the DMV database, then that is not obviously an issue.
- landemva 3y ago
  >> connect a person to a license plate number What I drive are owned by trusts and LLCs, so on paper they are not connected to my driver license nor to me. While I understand that cars are designed to be mobile and therefore easy to move around when stolen, I don't understand the necessity of a big plate with unique numbers. I don't have that on my bicycles. If plates reduce theft, let the insurance companies and manufacturers work that out.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Except California is also notorious for selling access to that DMV database
tevon 3y ago
License plates themselves are not PII. They are publicly available data. If the license plate is associated with OTHER PII it becomes a problem. However reading your license plate on the way into and out of a garage is just reading a publicly available code at different times of day. The fact that that code must always be displayed on your vehicle, and can be tied to your identity is an issue, but the code itself doesn't constitute PII.
- theptip 3y ago
  You’re making a blanket statement here which sounds like a first-principles argument, but in reality it’s nuanced. It seems under GDPR license plate numbers are considered personal data. Not sure about CCPA/CPRA.
- landemva 3y ago
  >> They are publicly available data. Plate info is not public to average Jane and Joe. In a State in USA I tried to get owner info of a plate marked 'gvt' and was denied because DMV said I'm not a private investigator or something.
akira2501 3y ago
We need to get rid of license plates then. They're an inappropriate solution to the technical problem they were invented for now that the internet exists. It used to be that police had limited ways to verify ownership of a vehicle, and a simple state owned database with state issued numbers was a useful tool to solve this problem. Now.. the police have internet connected mobile terminals. I'm not sure a "number plate" is the right solution to any part of this problem anymore.
- tzs 3y ago
  So say police are looking for someone who is suspected to be in a white Ford Bronco. They see a white Ford Bronco and want to use their internet connected mobile terminal to see if that is the white Ford Bronco they are looking for. Without license plates how are they to tell what that terminal is connect to which white Ford Bronco they are inquiring about? Do they have to actually stop every white Ford Bronco they see so they can read the VIN or get the driver's ID?
  - akira2501 3y ago
    You have several pieces of identification. The suspect description. The vehicle make, model, condition and color. The last known location. The plate numbers. The plate numbers are the least likely to be correct and the least likely mechanism of finding the vehicle in question. The plate number will help you discriminate between two vehicles, but it does not aid in the search. Likewise police helicopters have no problem following specific vehicles even though the plates cannot be read. So, you are imagining a situation where there are two identical suspects that cannot be discriminated from each other using all the above information and it will somehow come down to the plate, and without it, police will be unable to proceed correctly? Is this actually any different from a suspect on foot or a bicycle or skateboard?

petsfed 3y ago

I've said this before elsewhere, but this is precisely the situation where the distinction is important. There's this disease within the tech community where people can't see the harm of scaling things up using automation. Potentially harmful thing X, previously moderated and slowed by the high cost of labor to do it at scale, must not be harmful because we've always technically allowed it, so therefore we should not do anything to moderate it now that robots are doing it for us. "We could run this nuclear reaction at a much faster rate if we just removed the moderator, what could go wrong?"

akira2501 3y ago
What is the actual harm here? If you don't pay for the property, and you refuse to work out an agreement with the owner, they are entitled to come get their property. How is there additional harm, at this point, by using ALPRs to find the (effectively) stolen property? It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this. Not quite true. Buy here pay here dealerships and similar are absolutely eager to do this, and will go out of their way to make it onerous to pay what is owed, so they can sell the same 5 year old Kia for $15K multiple times over.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    They also tend to just put a GPS tracker in the car, which seems far more onerous than a repossession agent with an ALPR database at hand.
- petsfed 3y ago
  There's currently months of effort, in part because of the labor constraints. Its not worth paying a guy with a tow truck to go looking for a car that might not even be there. ALPRs exist to lower that cost of labor, potentially to the point that the lender can still make money sending out the repo guy much sooner than 90 days. I'm not even upset about that. Hell, it might be a net good, I dunno. The thing that I'm concerned about is that there is no guarantee (or even guard rail, really) against selling that data to a law enforcement organization that would otherwise have to undergo judicial scrutiny to get that data. What happens when some hacker gets a hold of their license plate database and uses it for an actual stalking operation? Or who knows what else?