4 ms·

It never ceases to amaze me how much privacy people expect to have when they are out in public.

by jack-r-abbit 14y ago

Zikes 14y ago
I don't expect privacy, just a reasonable degree of anonymity.
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  Fair enough. To prevent problems, only Cronin and Hutton can add plates to the hot list. Each time a plate is run for historical data by either an officer or requested by an outside agency, the requester has to inform the chief by e-mail. Requests are tallied in an annual report for the town council. The system parses license plates and matches them against a hot list. If a match is made, then a human gets notified. Some database somewhere knows the cars that have come and gone. But there is nothing to indicate that each license plate that gets captured is matched up to a person. The screen shot they have only shows the basic info captured from the camera. So unless your plate is on the hot list or someone with the authority requests to pull historical data about your plate number this does seem like a reasonable degree of anonymity. It would be nice if this was regulated a bit. Data should get purged in a reasonable time frame. Solid auditing for data retrieval requests.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  But you are not anonymous in public, at least not to the authorities. You never have been.
mc32 14y ago
Japan was able to track their last two AUM fugitives via CC-TVs in Train stations and thos on public utility poles (yes, it seems Japan still has a significant amount of local transmission wires above ground). The difference being facial rather than number plate recognition. In addition to big-crime solving such as AUM, they are also able to solve weird crimes like a couple who was disposing of their trash in highway rest-stops[1]. So it's two faceted, at least. On the one hand it facilitates crime-solving with fewer resources, on the other hand one loses one's anonymity in the big city (in smaller cities where everyone knows of everyone, this may be a lesser point). Exchange/forfeit privacy for money/fees/taxes. Google, Facebook would seem to point to people preferring convenience/paying fewer (taxes) than having anonymity. On the other hand, with Google and FB, you have a choice. Here it's either everyone opts in or opts out. [1] http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1209/OSK201112090099.html http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1209/OSK201112090099.ht...
- skorgu 14y ago
  In case I'm not the only baffled by what an AUM is I think it's the group that carried out the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
epoxyhockey 14y ago
It's the automation of privacy-invading technologies that gets me. I feel more and more like I'm being governed by computers and machines, not humans. I think that society is accustomed to a certain kind of slack when it comes to authority. We can get away with things sometimes. We can make mistakes and not come home with a ticket or citation every time. With all of these automated enforcement measures, we're all going to end up with rap sheets a mile long. There will be no such thing as someone having a clean record.
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  Alternatively, we as a society will pay more attention to what we are doing and stop doing things that we used to get away with. Sure I speed. Nearly everyone does. But just because there was no cop to see me and ticket me doesn't automagically make it legal. It just means I got away with it. If the stretch of highway I regularly commute on had speed cameras installed... it would not take too many tickets before that stretch of highway started to flow at the posted speed. People get pissed when a law that is largely unenforced starts to get enforced more strictly. So naturally they will want to strike down any new tech that assists in that stricter enforcement. I'm not sure how cops gave out speeding tickets before radar guns but I'll bet that tech dramatically increased their ability to enforce it. Not many people are up in arms about those these days.
  - lutorm 14y ago
    it would not take too many tickets before that stretch of highway started to flow at the posted speed Actually, it would have to flow quite a bit below the posted speed to be sure you didn't accidentally go above and get a ticket. An officer would probably decide that that was not a serious enough violation to warrant a ticket, but an automated system has no such discretion. I haven't seen any statistics on whether automated speed enforcement actually lowers the accident rate. It seems perfectly plausible to me that it would be counterproductive, because getting rid of the small number of seriously unsafe speeders would be counterbalanced by the fact that people in general will be much more paranoid about their speed and direct more attention to that to the detriment of paying attention to more important things like what's happening down the road.

It never ceases to amaze me how much privacy people expect to have when they are out in public.

Zikes 14y ago

I don't expect privacy, just a reasonable degree of anonymity.

jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Fair enough. To prevent problems, only Cronin and Hutton can add plates to the hot list. Each time a plate is run for historical data by either an officer or requested by an outside agency, the requester has to inform the chief by e-mail. Requests are tallied in an annual report for the town council. The system parses license plates and matches them against a hot list. If a match is made, then a human gets notified. Some database somewhere knows the cars that have come and gone. But there is nothing to indicate that each license plate that gets captured is matched up to a person. The screen shot they have only shows the basic info captured from the camera. So unless your plate is on the hot list or someone with the authority requests to pull historical data about your plate number this does seem like a reasonable degree of anonymity. It would be nice if this was regulated a bit. Data should get purged in a reasonable time frame. Solid auditing for data retrieval requests.
Karunamon 14y ago
But you are not anonymous in public, at least not to the authorities. You never have been.

mc32 14y ago

Japan was able to track their last two AUM fugitives via CC-TVs in Train stations and thos on public utility poles (yes, it seems Japan still has a significant amount of local transmission wires above ground). The difference being facial rather than number plate recognition. In addition to big-crime solving such as AUM, they are also able to solve weird crimes like a couple who was disposing of their trash in highway rest-stops[1]. So it's two faceted, at least. On the one hand it facilitates crime-solving with fewer resources, on the other hand one loses one's anonymity in the big city (in smaller cities where everyone knows of everyone, this may be a lesser point). Exchange/forfeit privacy for money/fees/taxes. Google, Facebook would seem to point to people preferring convenience/paying fewer (taxes) than having anonymity. On the other hand, with Google and FB, you have a choice. Here it's either everyone opts in or opts out. [1] http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1209/OSK201112090099.html http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1209/OSK201112090099.ht...

skorgu 14y ago
In case I'm not the only baffled by what an AUM is I think it's the group that carried out the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo

epoxyhockey 14y ago

It's the automation of privacy-invading technologies that gets me. I feel more and more like I'm being governed by computers and machines, not humans. I think that society is accustomed to a certain kind of slack when it comes to authority. We can get away with things sometimes. We can make mistakes and not come home with a ticket or citation every time. With all of these automated enforcement measures, we're all going to end up with rap sheets a mile long. There will be no such thing as someone having a clean record.

jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Alternatively, we as a society will pay more attention to what we are doing and stop doing things that we used to get away with. Sure I speed. Nearly everyone does. But just because there was no cop to see me and ticket me doesn't automagically make it legal. It just means I got away with it. If the stretch of highway I regularly commute on had speed cameras installed... it would not take too many tickets before that stretch of highway started to flow at the posted speed. People get pissed when a law that is largely unenforced starts to get enforced more strictly. So naturally they will want to strike down any new tech that assists in that stricter enforcement. I'm not sure how cops gave out speeding tickets before radar guns but I'll bet that tech dramatically increased their ability to enforce it. Not many people are up in arms about those these days.
- lutorm 14y ago
  it would not take too many tickets before that stretch of highway started to flow at the posted speed Actually, it would have to flow quite a bit below the posted speed to be sure you didn't accidentally go above and get a ticket. An officer would probably decide that that was not a serious enough violation to warrant a ticket, but an automated system has no such discretion. I haven't seen any statistics on whether automated speed enforcement actually lowers the accident rate. It seems perfectly plausible to me that it would be counterproductive, because getting rid of the small number of seriously unsafe speeders would be counterbalanced by the fact that people in general will be much more paranoid about their speed and direct more attention to that to the detriment of paying attention to more important things like what's happening down the road.