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My instinctual reaction to this has always been "well, you drive around in public, and your license plate is on the back of your car, so of course you can't exp

My instinctual reaction to this has always been "well, you drive around in public, and your license plate is on the back of your car, so of course you can't expect privacy of it any more than you can stop someone from following you and taking photos of it." And generally I feel it's a valid argument, but it exposes two root problems: 1) Scale: There is a clear difference between a single person photographing license plates in a parking lot, or even a single person following one car, compared to an enterprise industrializing that tracking process through wholesale procuring of security camera footage or similar. 2) Linkage: Even if your license plate can be tracked, why should it be linked to your identity? The answer is that it really shouldn't. Of course you can register your vehicle to an LLC, but even if you don't do that, you shouldn't expect anyone on the road to map your license plate to your address. But again we return to the problem of scale, because ultimately someone could see your car in your driveway, then see it on the road, and therefore know your starting location and current location. The first problem of scale, while clearly exposing an obvious difference, doesn't seem easily resolvable to me, because at what point is a process "industrialized?" How do you legislate against this without imposing on constitutionally protected activity, or at least basic pseudo-freedoms like freedom of commerce? And how do you avoid regulatory capture granting carve outs to a few anointed large corporations to continue the practice, especially if they're the same corporations that "contract" with the government? [One side-problem/solution here is the lack of transparency of, or restrictions on, government purchasing "public" data.] The second problem of linkage, seems more easily addressable (no pun intended). States should put more protections on license plate databases, and make it easier for people to register their vehicle through a proxy, even without needing to create an LLC. But you still have the problem of "manual" linkage using photos of driveways. But the larger, perhaps root issue, is that modern technology is exposing a middle ground between "private" and "public" (meta)data - we see this with enterprise-scale tracking of public information, and also with "personal data" shared with limited audiences on social media sites, where it's obviously not private because you intend to share it with people, but you also don't intend to share it with everyone.

phantom784 3y ago
Privacy could be a use case for those e ink license plates that have started showing up in California. Instead of the "real" number, change the plate every 5 minutes using some sort of OTP algorithm. Makes it impossible for anyone with a camera to put together a location database, but the car is still identifiable by law enforcement if necessary.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  An OTP license plate scheme is a very interesting idea. The license plate would probably have to get larger to accommodate more characters. EDIT: I wonder why you got downvoted. I've recently been seeing a lot of downvoted comments that there's little conceivable reason to downvote, so I wonder if downvoting is a new way of trolling.
  - floren 3y ago
    Well, for starters, if you witness a hit and run and don't note the EXACT time along with the plate number, you're outta luck.
    - tzs 3y ago
      Assuming that the function that generates the plate numbers from the current time and a per plate seed is deterministic this shouldn't be a problem. You tell the police you saw the car with plate 2XYZ345 do a hit on run and give a time range. The state would have the seeds in its plate owner database and could generate a list of all cars that had 2XYZ345 sometime in that time range.
      - floren 3y ago
        Good point!
    - Johnny555 3y ago
      Presumably such a system would keep a history of expired identifiers, so law enforcement could still look it up after it's been expired and replaced with a new one.
zen_1 3y ago
This comes down to the difference between certain people around town recognizing your car if they happen to see it pass by, vs them hiring dedicated car-watchers all around town to keep track of your comings and goings and selling the data to anyone who comes asking. One is acceptable, the other is simply not.
ssss11 3y ago
Scale, Linkage and Permanency. If I drive around, people seeing that don’t permanently record it but a data broker will. These have long been things overlooked by the “who needs privacy” crowd but they’re what’s most important.
b1gbr0ther 3y ago
There is a third concern besides scale and linkage -- errors and accountability. Sometimes these services are wrong. When they are wrong, and people get arrested, go to jail, or pay thousands in legal fees to clear themselves...there is no accountability. Sometimes, the law enforcement who use the systems rely ONLY on these systems, not on the underlyer data (e.g. images) to validate an arrest. Minimally, the services should have to produce an original image/video when surfacing information that will be used for legal action. Secondly, the services should be held financially responsible for legal costs when mistakes are made. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recognition-misidentify-jail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recogni...
- notquitehuman 3y ago
  I’ll add a fourth: these services will inevitably be hacked, their data added to multiple darkweb data dumps, and circulated among nation states, hackers, and advertisers for the rest of time.
- dionidium 3y ago
  If an eye-witness makes an erroneous identification, or a police officer misunderstands a piece of evidence, or a witness for the prosecution is coerced into giving false testimony, is that any different? In each case we're talking about information that turned out to wrong. This is just new information in the world. Sometimes it will be wrong or sometimes we will misunderstand it -- just like all other kinds of information.
- bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
  > Minimally, the services should have to produce an original image/video when surfacing information that will be used for legal action Even better would be an image that is cryptographically signed by the sensor that captured it.
bippihippi1 3y ago
would you really not expect that people shouldn't follow you around? if i drive around the city taking pictures of you in your car, that's harassment. why can a company do it? it's one thing for it to be available for polling if there's a crime, it's another thing to sell that data to anyone
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > if i drive around the city taking pictures of you in your car, that's harassment. Not if you have a government provided license, i.e. for private investigators. It looks like harassment, quacks like harassment, but the government got their money so they've said it's not harassment.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    It's still harassment, it's just legally permissible harassment.
    - bippihippi1 3y ago
      it is not
  - bippihippi1 3y ago
    if a private person does that for commercial reasons, it's harassment. if an ad company stalks you and send you bad ads, it's harassment.
CPLX 3y ago
We can just make it illegal if we want. We can pass a law and then enforce that law. There’s plenty of precedent for similar laws. Credit reports are another form of aggregating information about you that comes from other people’s reporting and it’s extremely circumscribed. You can’t keep files on what people think of my credit history without following very very detailed rules, as well as being strictly liable in private action for breaking any of the rules even by small technicalities. We can outlaw this if we want. Or restrict it heavily. I’m tired of listening to arguments that we can’t regulate commerce. It’s just learned helplessness after listening to generations of corporate lobbying.
- systems_glitch 3y ago
  Yup, strict rules, harsh punishments. Hope we see it come to pass.
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  > I’m tired of listening to arguments that we can’t regulate commerce. It’s just learned helplessness after listening to generations of corporate lobbying. Exactly. We don't need to go on some moral and ethical odyssey to discover where the line is. We can just draw a line and say "thats the line." The notion that we must be fair and equitable to business and commerce is tiring. No, we don't.
- pixl97 3y ago
  You can make a law to outlaw it, what you cannot expect is the side that does not want that law to not voice their opinions and not make arguments counter to yours. You're going to have to do a lot of work if you want to pass such a law.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    I expect the other side to attempt to influence politicians with money by hiring their former staffers and children as lobbyists, paying them off with bullshit speaking gigs, planting opinion pieces and influencing online commentators, and any of the thousand other ways big business tries to bulldoze consumers in this country. What's that got to do with anything? The point I'm making, of course, is that "fuck these people" is the right way to think about it. There's no human right to make money off selling license plate data or something. People can find another business model or something else to do with their lives. Fuck them, and fuck their consumer privacy invading businesses.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Scale is the problem but I can't think of any easy way to put in writing how much scale is bad. Has anybody been genuinely harmed by this?
favflam 3y ago
Public transit gets another plus. Bicycles get a double plus as you do not even tap into a system, nor have a license plate.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  What plus? Don't you have to register your transit pass card to your legal identity?
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    Nope, there's vending machines to buy the cards and you can use cash
- greyface- 3y ago
  In my jurisdiction, the local transit authority keeps a database of every fare payment ever made, with no expiry policy or any other future-looking privacy measures. The records are easily and routinely subpoenaed by law enforcement, and non-anonymized datasets are shared with researchers, as long as they pinky-swear to not compromise anyone's privacy. You can pay in cash, but have to pay an extra fee for a new fare card each time you want a new unique ID. Nobody seems to care.
bagels 3y ago
You don't really get a choice to use or not use a license plate if you want to drive, and are seriously disadvantaged if you do not have a car in most places in the US. Should it be a requirement to give up your privacy to participate meaningfully in society?
godelski 3y ago
So I think that thinking was good 20 years ago but isn't fine today. The difference is really the environments we live in. 20+ years ago it really wasn't hard to be private in a public space. You walk off the main street and if you couldn't see anyone then no one could see you, generally. Same would be true about audio. But today there's cameras everywhere and microphones everywhere, so privacy is not verifiable by simple observation. Plus, you have a GPS tracker on you that's talking to all the GPS trackers that's on everybody else. That's where the logic breaks down, but it requires subtly and a bit more nuance because the way we're tracked is covert and not as obvious. It can be automated and doesn't require someone to physically follow you. It can gather way more information that that person physically following you every could. It's not that the former logic was bad, it's that it works on a certain set of assumptions. Assumptions that don't hold true today. The problem we face today with a lot of arguments we have (more than privacy) is that people tend to be working under different assumptions, assuming everyone else has equivalent ones. Additionally, our assumptions are frequently wrong and we end up fighting rather than discussion, which it's fine to disagree with.

phantom784 3y ago

Privacy could be a use case for those e ink license plates that have started showing up in California. Instead of the "real" number, change the plate every 5 minutes using some sort of OTP algorithm. Makes it impossible for anyone with a camera to put together a location database, but the car is still identifiable by law enforcement if necessary.

cryptonector 3y ago
An OTP license plate scheme is a very interesting idea. The license plate would probably have to get larger to accommodate more characters. EDIT: I wonder why you got downvoted. I've recently been seeing a lot of downvoted comments that there's little conceivable reason to downvote, so I wonder if downvoting is a new way of trolling.
- floren 3y ago
  Well, for starters, if you witness a hit and run and don't note the EXACT time along with the plate number, you're outta luck.
  - tzs 3y ago
    Assuming that the function that generates the plate numbers from the current time and a per plate seed is deterministic this shouldn't be a problem. You tell the police you saw the car with plate 2XYZ345 do a hit on run and give a time range. The state would have the seeds in its plate owner database and could generate a list of all cars that had 2XYZ345 sometime in that time range.
    - floren 3y ago
      Good point!
  - Johnny555 3y ago
    Presumably such a system would keep a history of expired identifiers, so law enforcement could still look it up after it's been expired and replaced with a new one.

zen_1 3y ago

This comes down to the difference between certain people around town recognizing your car if they happen to see it pass by, vs them hiring dedicated car-watchers all around town to keep track of your comings and goings and selling the data to anyone who comes asking. One is acceptable, the other is simply not.

ssss11 3y ago

Scale, Linkage and Permanency. If I drive around, people seeing that don’t permanently record it but a data broker will. These have long been things overlooked by the “who needs privacy” crowd but they’re what’s most important.

b1gbr0ther 3y ago

There is a third concern besides scale and linkage -- errors and accountability. Sometimes these services are wrong. When they are wrong, and people get arrested, go to jail, or pay thousands in legal fees to clear themselves...there is no accountability. Sometimes, the law enforcement who use the systems rely ONLY on these systems, not on the underlyer data (e.g. images) to validate an arrest. Minimally, the services should have to produce an original image/video when surfacing information that will be used for legal action. Secondly, the services should be held financially responsible for legal costs when mistakes are made. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recognition-misidentify-jail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recogni...

notquitehuman 3y ago
I’ll add a fourth: these services will inevitably be hacked, their data added to multiple darkweb data dumps, and circulated among nation states, hackers, and advertisers for the rest of time.
dionidium 3y ago
If an eye-witness makes an erroneous identification, or a police officer misunderstands a piece of evidence, or a witness for the prosecution is coerced into giving false testimony, is that any different? In each case we're talking about information that turned out to wrong. This is just new information in the world. Sometimes it will be wrong or sometimes we will misunderstand it -- just like all other kinds of information.
bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
> Minimally, the services should have to produce an original image/video when surfacing information that will be used for legal action Even better would be an image that is cryptographically signed by the sensor that captured it.

bippihippi1 3y ago

would you really not expect that people shouldn't follow you around? if i drive around the city taking pictures of you in your car, that's harassment. why can a company do it? it's one thing for it to be available for polling if there's a crime, it's another thing to sell that data to anyone

brightlancer 3y ago
> if i drive around the city taking pictures of you in your car, that's harassment. Not if you have a government provided license, i.e. for private investigators. It looks like harassment, quacks like harassment, but the government got their money so they've said it's not harassment.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It's still harassment, it's just legally permissible harassment.
  - bippihippi1 3y ago
    it is not
- bippihippi1 3y ago
  if a private person does that for commercial reasons, it's harassment. if an ad company stalks you and send you bad ads, it's harassment.

CPLX 3y ago

We can just make it illegal if we want. We can pass a law and then enforce that law. There’s plenty of precedent for similar laws. Credit reports are another form of aggregating information about you that comes from other people’s reporting and it’s extremely circumscribed. You can’t keep files on what people think of my credit history without following very very detailed rules, as well as being strictly liable in private action for breaking any of the rules even by small technicalities. We can outlaw this if we want. Or restrict it heavily. I’m tired of listening to arguments that we can’t regulate commerce. It’s just learned helplessness after listening to generations of corporate lobbying.

systems_glitch 3y ago
Yup, strict rules, harsh punishments. Hope we see it come to pass.
genocidicbunny 3y ago
> I’m tired of listening to arguments that we can’t regulate commerce. It’s just learned helplessness after listening to generations of corporate lobbying. Exactly. We don't need to go on some moral and ethical odyssey to discover where the line is. We can just draw a line and say "thats the line." The notion that we must be fair and equitable to business and commerce is tiring. No, we don't.
pixl97 3y ago
You can make a law to outlaw it, what you cannot expect is the side that does not want that law to not voice their opinions and not make arguments counter to yours. You're going to have to do a lot of work if you want to pass such a law.
- CPLX 3y ago
  I expect the other side to attempt to influence politicians with money by hiring their former staffers and children as lobbyists, paying them off with bullshit speaking gigs, planting opinion pieces and influencing online commentators, and any of the thousand other ways big business tries to bulldoze consumers in this country. What's that got to do with anything? The point I'm making, of course, is that "fuck these people" is the right way to think about it. There's no human right to make money off selling license plate data or something. People can find another business model or something else to do with their lives. Fuck them, and fuck their consumer privacy invading businesses.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Scale is the problem but I can't think of any easy way to put in writing how much scale is bad. Has anybody been genuinely harmed by this?

favflam 3y ago

Public transit gets another plus. Bicycles get a double plus as you do not even tap into a system, nor have a license plate.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
What plus? Don't you have to register your transit pass card to your legal identity?
- hanniabu 3y ago
  Nope, there's vending machines to buy the cards and you can use cash
greyface- 3y ago
In my jurisdiction, the local transit authority keeps a database of every fare payment ever made, with no expiry policy or any other future-looking privacy measures. The records are easily and routinely subpoenaed by law enforcement, and non-anonymized datasets are shared with researchers, as long as they pinky-swear to not compromise anyone's privacy. You can pay in cash, but have to pay an extra fee for a new fare card each time you want a new unique ID. Nobody seems to care.

bagels 3y ago

You don't really get a choice to use or not use a license plate if you want to drive, and are seriously disadvantaged if you do not have a car in most places in the US. Should it be a requirement to give up your privacy to participate meaningfully in society?

godelski 3y ago

So I think that thinking was good 20 years ago but isn't fine today. The difference is really the environments we live in. 20+ years ago it really wasn't hard to be private in a public space. You walk off the main street and if you couldn't see anyone then no one could see you, generally. Same would be true about audio. But today there's cameras everywhere and microphones everywhere, so privacy is not verifiable by simple observation. Plus, you have a GPS tracker on you that's talking to all the GPS trackers that's on everybody else. That's where the logic breaks down, but it requires subtly and a bit more nuance because the way we're tracked is covert and not as obvious. It can be automated and doesn't require someone to physically follow you. It can gather way more information that that person physically following you every could. It's not that the former logic was bad, it's that it works on a certain set of assumptions. Assumptions that don't hold true today. The problem we face today with a lot of arguments we have (more than privacy) is that people tend to be working under different assumptions, assuming everyone else has equivalent ones. Additionally, our assumptions are frequently wrong and we end up fighting rather than discussion, which it's fine to disagree with.