8 ms·

I'm curious what you think the solution is? Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a

• Teever 1y ago
  The solution is to wake up and start treating this like it is which is mass stalking. Sousveillance against the people who profit from these disgusting antisocial behaviours should be common place. If an individual was to do this to a single person they'd considered a creep and the cops would rustle them out of a the bushes and seize all their cameras as evidence of their stalking behaviour. The act of incorporating and doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it legal.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• batisteo 1y ago
  There is a huge overlap between legal and immoral
• vkou 1y ago
  > I'm curious what you think the solution is? The solution is simple. If there's a judge that signed off on a warrant to track a particular vehicle or person, cameras should be permitted to track its movements. Otherwise, cameras should only be allowed to track people actively breaking the law - such as sending tickets to people running red lights. They should not record or retain any information about drivers that are following the rules. Fishing expeditions are illegal and immoral. Mass tracking of innocent people is immoral. --- Judicial warrants exist as a counterbalance between two public needs (The need to not be harassed by the police for no good reason, and the need for the police to be able to conduct active, targeted investigations of a particular crime.)
• sejje 1y ago
  Come on, it's not that hard to think of a solution. Pass a law making it illegal to do a combination of collecting and storing personally identifying information, such as a license plate number, in a timestamped database with location data. Extra penalty if it's done for the purpose of selling the data.
  • huem0n 1y ago
    Glad to see I'm not the only one that thinks its obvious
  • ianstormtaylor 1y ago
    Not saying I agree with OP, but for the law you described: any photo you take of a license plate on your smartphone would fit that description (unless you’ve explicitly disabled the automatic location and time stamping default). So you’d need to further distinguish to preserve that freedom.
    • bigmadshoe 1y ago
      Then make the act of selling it or storing it in a database with the intent to track people illegal?
      • ianstormtaylor 1y ago
        Basing it around the act of selling data seems like a much better approach to me than what OP suggested, I agree. I imagine there are edge cases to consider around how acquisitions of company assets would work, although it’s not a use case I particularly care to defend. “Intent to track” could be an approach, but the toll bridges near me use license plate scanners for payment, so I could see it not being that clear cut. There are likely other valid use cases, like statistical surveys, congestion pricing laws, etc.
    • baconner 1y ago
      Its not hard to distugush individual pictures that contain trackable attributes like a license plate number from building a large scale database of them for sale. Or making such a database not legal to sell access to without removing that information, etc. It doesn't need to center on the contents of a single photo.
• huem0n 1y ago
  Require commercially used photos to not contain identifying information (face license plate) without consent of the owner (of the license plate/face). This already happens a lot on Google street view.
  • kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    License plates are owned by the government.
    • cwillu 1y ago
      So what?
    • dghughes 1y ago
      But not where it is in real-time or its location history.
    • pseudalopex 1y ago
      Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • rootusrootus 1y ago
      AFAIK that is not correct. They are issued by the government. Required by the government to be displayed on the car if you are driving on public roads. But the plate is not physically owned by the government. The biggest distinction seems to be that in some states it becomes part of the car, and in other states it stays with the driver when ownership of the car changes hands (or the owner of the car can choose either option when selling the car). As an aside, these days I am guessing the latter is the truth in most states. So many specialty and personalized plate options out there that people are going to want to keep for themselves. Obviously the government does own a small number of plates, of course, because they attach them to government owned vehicles.
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
• IOT_Apprentice 1y ago
  It should be illegal for the government to do so, further make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases.
  • martin-t 1y ago
    Restrictions and oversight should increase proportionally to the power an entity has. This is a very under-appreciated concept.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > make it illegal for businesses to do so AND for city, county, state, federal governments to utilize third party databases Local control and storage should be a requirement.
    • LazyMans 1y ago
      You do not want local govt each building their own “secure” system.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > You do not want local govt each building their own “secure” system I really do. A centralised, insecure [1] database could lead to America losing a war. A distributed system of low-reliability nodes is more robust than a centralised system that's very reliable. "ARPANET," after all "was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack." (That's not what it wound up becoming.) [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-police-logins-are-exposing-flock-surveillance-cameras-to-hackers/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
• stackedinserter 1y ago
  Get rid of license plates.
  • 9dev 1y ago
    How to easily identify a car in a myriad of scenarios then that may or may absolutely not involve digital devices, like quickly remembering someone fleeing from an accident?
    • kragen 1y ago
      It would be surprising if the solution were not worse in some way than the status quo ante; after all, we're looking for a solution to the new problem of mass surveillance, not taking advantage of a new opportunity.
    • stackedinserter 1y ago
      How to easily identify a person in even more myriad of scenarios? If we have license plates for cars, we need to have them for people.
• xnx 1y ago
  Ironically, you'll have more privacy in a Waymo than your own car.
  • Animats 1y ago
    No, you have to have a Google or Apple account tracking you under their terms.
    • DaSHacka 1y ago
      But that data is not shared anywhere, where companies like Flock sell it to a number of third parties.
      • kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
        Your phone IMEI is being tracked everywhere.
        • xnx 1y ago
          Yes. Should we even worry about license plates specifically?
    • xnx 1y ago
      Right, Google would certainly know, but the rest of the world would not.
• jakelazaroff 1y ago
  > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. > Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public. One absolutely does not follow the other; there are all sorts of things that are legal only if done for certain purposes, only below a certain scale, etc. The idea that we must permit both or neither is a false dichotomy.
  • wmeredith 1y ago
    E.g. I have the personal liberty to host card game for money at my house. But if I require a house take, now I'm running a gambling business.
    • jMyles 1y ago
      That's not a difference in scope; it's a difference in kind. And even the latter is fraught with hazards to liberty.
      • pseudalopex 1y ago
        Observing and recording is a difference in kind. Recording and processing is a difference in kind. Processing and selling is a difference in kind. And quantity has a quality all its own.
        • jMyles 1y ago
          > Observing and recording is a difference in kind. Not if you believe in a right of general-purpose computing. Your brain records everything you observe. If you can use a computer for any purpose you choose, then you can use it to record what you can see and hear.
          • pseudalopex 1y ago
            Human memory is not recording in common or legal language. And laws now reflect the difference. Copyright for example.
• sandworm101 1y ago
  Hacker solution: open/crowd source a pirate camera network. People submit feeds of traffic from whatever camera they have. We build tiny/concealable cameras to plant all over state capitals. Client-side software detects plates and reports only those on the target list. That list: every elected leader. The next time they hold a privacy-related hearing, we read out the committee chairperson's daily movements for the last month. Other idea: AI-enabled dashcam detects and automatically reports "emergency vehicles" to google maps hands free. Goodbye speed traps.
  • DaSHacka 1y ago
    You don't even need something so complicated. Those Flock cameras are so vulnerable you can easily make a botnet from them and make them serve your own malicious purpose.
  • wolpoli 1y ago
    They just might write a law that makes the act of publicly disseminating travel data for future and past official's illegal.
• JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > curious what you think the solution is? Require a warrant for law enforcement to poll these databases. And make the database operators strictly liable for breaches and mis-use. For all we know, "suspicious" travel patterns may include visiting a place of religious worship or an abortion clinic. For a future President, it may be parking near the home of someone who tweeted support for a J6'er. (And we haven't even touched the national security risk Flock poses [1].) [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-police-logins-are-exposing-flock-surveillance-cameras-to-hackers/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/lawmakers-say-stolen-polic...
  • kragen 1y ago
    Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases? Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Are you also going to require a warrant for paramilitary insurgent groups to poll these databases? No. Because this is a straw man. > Maybe you intended to propose for them to be abolished entirely Banks operate with liability for losses resulting from breaches. Unless Flock et al are routinly losing their entire database, this shouldn't be exisential.
      • kragen 1y ago
        It isn't a straw man; paramilitary insurgent groups will just look like normal customers to Flock et al., except when they're stealing their entire database, which will indeed happen routinely.
        • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
          > paramilitary insurgent groups will just look like normal customers to Flock et al. Existing liability law works just fine for terrorism. (Guns notwithstanding.)
• floor2 1y ago
  Maybe it's time to do away with license plates. Police could switch to using VIN for tracking of warrants and such, which can be obtained after a car is pulled over. Modern technology allows for every citizen to be tracked more comprehensively than the most wanted mob bosses or suspected soviet spies just a few decades ago. Or simply outlaw the mass collection and sale or sharing of the data. We already outlaw sharing copies of music or movies, so I don't want to hear any complaints about enforcement- sure there'd still be some data floating around from random photos with a car in the background, but you wouldn't have repo tow truck drivers scanning 20,000 license plates a night or cameras in parking lots and such.
• salawat 1y ago
  It is a matter of law that no digital database of firearms data can be made. The friction is a feature. I'd propose something surrounding license plates, phone info, SIM's and VIN's may be needed. Of course, LE and tax authorities would scream bloody murder, but if we didn't see such flagrant abuse of sensitive identifiers, then maybe they could be trusted with nice things.
  • cogman10 1y ago
    IDK that I even have a problem with such a database existing (just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing). What I care about is access to the data. It should absolutely require a warrant before it can be accessed. That means the agency that wants to access it needs to prove to a judge that the person they are trying to track has done something wrong or worth invading their privacy over. As it stands, we allow joe bob to access that database so he can harass brown people working on my roof.
    • salawat 1y ago
      No, no, no. >just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing) You might not care, but even before computers were a big thing, and people thought "Computer" and IBM mainframes were synonymous, it was put forth in law that no central digital registry of firearms was to be made available to the Federal Government. View regulations under https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057 In short, NFA, GCA, and FOPA basically synergize to outlaw centralized registries of firearms owners in the U.S. due to the recognition of the particular temptation and value in organizing activities resulting in disarming the populace. It is absolutely the case other identifiers and activity can be restricted to prevent foreseeable abuse, and to be honest, that this type of abuse wasn't foreseen is frankly testament to either our forebearers being comfortable with a surveillance dystopia or just being so disconnected from technical possibilities that they didn't understand the fire we were working with.
      • cogman10 1y ago
        Any notion of an armed populace doing anything useful to protect freedom has been thoroughly debunked with the current administration. If we can send people to concentration camps without a single armed conflict I can't for the life of me see why anyone would presume guns to have any effect on limiting tyranny. That's why I just can't care about a firearm database being potentially used nefariously. Gun rights have done nothing positive for America.
• analog8374 1y ago
  Make everybody secure, happy and sane enough that using such powers for ill becomes uninteresting.
  • simonw 1y ago
    Not great news for people who want to have affairs. Or (a better example) escape from an abusive relationship.
• zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago
  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2261A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2261A
• kragen 1y ago
  Eliminating license plates would be a good step. As I understand it, license plates were established as a compromise between privacy and accountability: they made it possible to track down evildoers without entirely eliminating anonymity in public. Now, due to advances in computer technology, they entirely eliminate anonymity in public. Therefore we should abolish them and invent an alternative that strikes a better balance between these concerns. Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed.
  • cogman10 1y ago
    > Encrypted radio beacons, for example, which beep to alert the driver when they are being probed. That thing would ping so often that everyone would just turn it off. You'd also want to require it to always be on so that, for example, someone can't do a hit and run. The problem that needs to be addressed is the fact that the american police force has WAY too much power and funding. Particularly the DHS. The tracking sucks, but what sucks more is the police using that tracking in pretty much any way imaginable.
    • kragen 1y ago
      You'd need to have some causal pathway from it pinging too often through people getting irritated to removing the scanners that were doing the excessive tracking. Police forces are not the only ones who can use this information. Foreign intelligence agencies, violent insurgencies, and drug cartels can also use it.
      • cogman10 1y ago
        The rub is that the information is something that regular drivers need access to. If I get into a car accident, I need some way to know who hit me in the case they bolt from the scene. And that's what makes this a hard problem. I don't think there's a solution that allows me to address a hit and run and would prevent the groups you mention from similarly tracking people.
        • 1y ago
• analog31 1y ago
  I think the data itself has to come under attack in a variety of ways. Thinking off the top of my head: Possession of the data could be made illegal. The data could be treated as a public record. Defendants could be guaranteed access to all data about them in the government's possession.
• blacksmith_tb 1y ago
  Ride a bike! I half-kid, but it's interesting to consider that cycling is a right which can't be taken away in the US, while driving is a privilege that can be revoked.
  • ddalex 1y ago
    > cycling is a right which can't be taken away in the US Why not ?
    • blacksmith_tb 1y ago
      Practically, because bicyclists aren't licensed. It is true that in some jurisdictions cyclists have to register or license their bicycles, so potentially failure to do so could get you fined or even have your bike impounded.
      • ddalex 1y ago
        you're missing that this is the land of the free where us drivers are being detained at will why do you think bicyclists are exempt from this abusive behaviour ?
      • red-iron-pine 1y ago
        what jurisdictions are these? show me
  • potato3732842 1y ago
    If riding a bike was as common as a car it'd be regulated all the same. You already see "certain demographics" that suspiciously always seem to feature prominently in any given decade's policy failings screeching about how e-bikes need registration because they let people they don't like have easy geographic mobility.
    • andylynch 1y ago
      Nope. Regulation of cars , like anything, is expensive. It’s worthwhile for cars for safety reasons, but bikes are cheaper, and also way less dangerous in general, so need a lighter hand. The current cutoff in EU is probably right, above a certain power level, e bikes are l, broadly, treated an motorcycles (licensing, type approval, insurance etc) , below that and with non-e bikes, is really just about the basics, eg are the wheels firmly attached and do the brakes and lights work?
• aeturnum 1y ago
  I think we have a mass re-assessment coming for how we think about data collected in public spaces. The realities of mass surveillance and mass data correlation come to very different outcomes than they did when we established our current rules about what is allowed in public spaces. I don't really know what a better system looks like - but I suspect it has to do with the step where the info is provided to a third party. We can all exist in public and we can all take in whatever is happening in public - but it's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom. Obviously this cuts both ways and we need to think carefully about preserving citizens rights to observe and report on the behavior of authorities (though also you could argue that reporting on people doing their jobs in the public space is different than reporting on private citizens).
  • mikem170 1y ago
    > we can all take in whatever is happening in public People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not? This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data. Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.
    • throwaway2037 1y ago
      > People have the right to take in what is in public You write this as if it is a fundamental human right. I disagree. I could imagine this could be treated differently in different cultures. As an example, Google Maps has heavily censored their Street View in Germany to scrub any personal info (including faces). Another common issue that is handled very differently in different cultures: How to control video recording in public places.
      • johnnyanmac 1y ago
• aftbit 1y ago
  I think the solution is simple - make it legal to hide your license plate, but make the hiders required to be remotely openable by an authorized law enforcement user. The plate hider should keep an audit log of the time, name, and badge number of the cop that required it to be opened. Anyone who wants to read license plates for a private purpose (not law enforcement) can either ask you nicely to open the hider, or screw off.
  • intrasight 1y ago
    Then we just get rid of license plates and have them implemented with digital telemetry. Which is probably gonna happen regardless.
    • fragmede 1y ago
      you know about tpms serial numbers, yeah?
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      More likely we get RFID tags in them or something and then the cops stop caring about the letters being defaced (except as a pretest for fishing, same story as tail light out or whatever) because they just use the tag reader 99.999% of the time.
• bitexploder 1y ago
  Doing this as a private citizen is one thing. When the government does it the implications are vastly different. That is kind of the whole point of the constitution.
• codexb 1y ago
  License plate holders that obscure the license plate on private property.
• kryogen1c 1y ago
  > But what is the solution? Don't allow the commoditization of public imagery, ie being a tourist is legal and being a business is not.
• jdiff 1y ago
  Owning a baseball bat is completely legal. Swinging it in your immediate vicinity is completely legal. Standing within baseball bat range of other people is completely legal. But you'll quickly find yourself detained if you try to practice this innocent collection of legal activities together. The whole is different from the sum of its parts. It's a very common occurrence.
  • beeflet 1y ago
    Okay, but in this instance it is a matter of scale.
    • jdiff 1y ago
      Scale is not immune to targeting. Laws are applied differently based on scale in an variety of ways. Businesses with fewer employees have exemptions from a variety of regulations. People with lower incomes have less to pay in taxes. Transactions below a certain dollar amount used to be exempt from tariffs in the US.
• cycomanic 1y ago
  > I'm curious what you think the solution is? > > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. > > Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public. > Collecting and selling PII without a person's consent is certainly not legal in many places.
• nkrisc 1y ago
  > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. And perhaps it was legal because before mass surveillance and automatic license plate readers it was difficult to impossible to abuse that. Perhaps it shouldn’t be legal in the same way anymore. These days they can just photograph everyone and then go back later and figure out where they were when that person is of interest. It’s pre-emptive investigation of innocent people for future use.
• calvinmorrison 1y ago
  The solution is to make it illegal to record individuals in public for the purpose of tracking.
• johnnyanmac 1y ago
  It's the same question we're asking with scraping. It's legal to read the data off one website. What's in question is mass scraping the entire Internet and bringing hundreds of sites to a halt. Change the scope of the data, and you change your approach to the problem. I see no reason why law should be any different.
• jorvi 1y ago
  > Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public. In the US. GDPR forbids sharing or processing it without consent. Maybe the Californian privacy act does too?
• scarecrowbob 1y ago
  When I tell folks that I come to HN to see a particular kind of take, this is what I'm talking about. Here is a premise: you can decompose any illegal action into legal actions, therefore according to your logic laws cannot not exist.
  • antonvs 1y ago
    > When I tell folks that I come to HN to see a particular kind of take, this is what I'm talking about. Is this a form of masochism?
    • scarecrowbob 1y ago
      [dead]
      • beeflet 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • scarecrowbob 1y ago
          Well friend, many people have better ideas.
        • scarecrowbob 1y ago
          Also, for what it's worth, I did spend last Friday driving around collecting pictures of the local flock cameras in my small local municipality and associating them with their deflock listings (and did discover an error), and have been discussing what we will do about them with my local group of activists. I don't have a great grasp on our shared material reality, but I am trying to get better at it.
      • fragmede 1y ago
        > solve global warming by blotting out the sun Shhh, that's Elon Musk's real plan to become a trillionaire. You want sunlight? $1/minute, everyone on the sunny side of the Earth, pay up.
• potato3732842 1y ago
  >But what is the solution? The best time to plant a tree is 20yr ago. The second best time is today. The best time to ostracize, ridicule and marginalize the people who support the growth of the surveillance state is a generation ago. The second best time is today. I say we ostracize the crap out of the people who peddle, justify and facilitate these activities. It worked for wife beating, worked for drunk driving, worked for overt racism. This is not a technical problem. This is not a law problem. This is a social norms and acceptability of certain actions problem. Applications of technology and law follow norms.
  • garyfirestorm 1y ago
    This is a law problem though. This is clear violation of 4th amendment. You’re being unreasonably searched when a set of traffic observation cameras turn into surveillance of a particular individual. This is not that hard to understand, observing traffic flow != tracking YOU in particular. That should require a probable cause and proper warrant, we want to identify this individuals movements because …
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      The US system is VERY good at giving a minority veto power if there is legal avenue for such (see also: obamacare). We've been walking all over the 4th (and others) since the 20th century. This isn't a law problem. This is a "there is clearly broad political will for violation of rights in limited circumstances and the system is taking it and running with it as far as it can" problem.
  • beeflet 1y ago
    There are no social norms problems. Social norms are always a response to technology and not the other way around.
• hellojesus 1y ago
  Allow people to secure temporary plates that are just aliases to their normal plate so they can be swapped every x hours. Then people could use paper temp plates and change them frequently while the state still maintains the supeonable connection to the true registration. Knowing the US dmv, this will cost $50 and only be doable twice per year, but it should be offered free of charge to be reprinted at least daily. It's not expensive to maintain a massive data lake of the records.
• deadbolt 1y ago
  Come on man, does this actually stump you? You can't come up with a single possible solution to this problem?
• favflam 1y ago
  You ban monetization of the data. The federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce. States can ban this behavior as well. Furthermore, legislators can create a right to privacy in the law, letting people sue companies who collect this data. And to top it off, states and the federal government can make corporate officers personally liable for collecting this information without consent. With Lina Khan biding time in NYC, I do believe we are going to see this change very soon. I don't think there will be any public sympathy for tech companies in the next political cycle.
  • scoofy 1y ago
    Unlike normal activities, driving is an overtly public act. You need permission to do it, and it’s entirely reasonable for the state to monitor you doing it. That really complicates things.
• ssss11 1y ago
  Just like every other discussion about private data violation - the issue is aggregation not one data point.
• thatcat 1y ago
  Tracking someone everywhere they go is stalking, but tracking everyone is just good business strategy
• lbrito 1y ago
  >Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information Very typical engineer thinking. The world doesn't work that way. Laws and social norms don't abide by formal logic.
• ramblenode 1y ago
  Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum. The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
  • beeflet 1y ago
    >Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. No it isn't. It's evidenced by the fact that you will need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal >When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law. Okay, but what ought they resolve to? That is what we are debating.
    • ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
      > need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal Surveillance of specified individuals should be allowed, but just random surveillance of the public should be declared illegal except for very particular events and purposes (e.g. searching people for entry to a music gig). If there is public surveillance in an area, it should be made clear with signs etc unless it's for the express purpose of locating specified individuals (e.g. tracking a criminal's movements on public transport).
    • spectralista 1y ago
      No, you are simply wrong but ignorance of scaling properties is the spirit of the day. I suspect in the future a word will evolve for the stupidity of believing if a person can walk 3 miles in an hour then that scales to walking 500 miles in a week. I encounter this form of stupidity all the time.
• satellite2 1y ago
  Dynamic led plate that are totp. Where you can determine who is who on which date only with central access.
• pkulak 1y ago
  Not being such a car-dependent society that every single person is forced into a dangerous, personal machine that requires licensing and tracking, to do absolutely any activity outside the house.
  • beeflet 1y ago
    cameras can still track you regardless
    • pkulak 1y ago
      Facial recognition is a LOT harder. And there aren't laws saying you're not allowed to do anything that would disrupt it. AND the laws regarding taking photos of people are a lot different than the laws around taking photos of cars.
      • beeflet 1y ago
        Flock is already doing facial recognition
• ipaddr 1y ago
  Outlaw collecting more than 1,000 photos of license plates in a given city.
  • beeflet 1y ago
    Set up 1,000 shell corporations that take 1,000 photos of license plates. Maybe do it as a franchise or something. Make an app where you can install a camera near your house and the users are legally contractors: they get paid ~0.1c for each car that drives by.
• beeflet 1y ago
  Remove the legal requirements for license plates or tinted windows. We gimp the ability of the public to obfuscate their vehicle by forcing us to have license plates in the first place, when we already prove our license to drive with VIN and registration. Also, remove the intellectual property protections associated with the appearance of vehicles, thus creating a market of clones that can easily fit in with each other.
  • andylynch 1y ago
    That’s kind of the point of license plates though. They are there firstly so that when a driver damages something or hurts someone, they can be held responsible. What’s so bad about that?
    • beeflet 1y ago
      They can be used to hold anyone responsible for anything I deem wrong. What's so bad about that? Let's say I'm partnering with flock to track anyone who drives to say, a political convention I disagree with, and basically make your life hell. Maybe you don't want your employer to know everywhere you go. What's so bad about that? Or maybe you offended me in public, as long as I record your plate number I can find out your place of residence and employment through the FlockYou app for only $5. After all, people deserve to be held accountable for their actions.
      • andylynch 1y ago
        More practically, it’s about if someone hits you or someone you care about with their car or the like. Aggregation of data like Flock does is a different matter and can be handled separately. Like I mentioned in my other comment, other countries tend not to have things like Flock, since they understand unregulated data processing such as that is problematic for all sorts of reasons; the US is a big , big outlier in this area.
• andylynch 1y ago
  Counties with effective privacy laws focus on the control and processing of the data. Regulating data processing like this is common and should not be controversial.
• Bombthecat 1y ago
  In Germany it's legal to take car pictures, but if you publish, you need to black out the licence plate...
• egorfine 1y ago
  > I'm curious what you think the solution is? I believe cars don't have to have license plates readable when parked. Depends on the jurisdiction of course, but I would definitely use a license plate hiding device and hide my license plate when parked.
• jon-wood 1y ago
  You don't have to work this out from first principles, the EU have already done this in the form of GDPR. Building a database mapping people's location and selling it to third parties without their consent would be squarely illegal under GDPR, and result in massive fines given the entire business model is a breach rather than this being an oversight.
  • maxsilver 1y ago
    Yeah, honestly, GDPR isn't perfect legislation, but it's pretty close. You could just copy-and-paste GDPR into the US and, with actual enforcement behind it, most of the egregious violations would be fixed pretty quickly.
• Nextgrid 1y ago
  > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. Because when those laws were enacted the technology to do so at scale wasn't there or wasn't cost-efficient. So it made sense to make it legal because nobody could realistically abuse it. Nowadays this is no longer the case, so maybe the law should be amended. Of course, with the lawmakers being the ones benefiting from such abuses it's unlikely. > We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Some countries (Germany I believe) actually do outlaw it; I believe taking a picture is ok but publishing it requires consent of everyone in that picture. > journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption? You could allow free public disclosure, but disallow selling of that data. Meaning journalists can still conduct mass-surveillance for the public interest since the results of that would be published free-of-charge, while destroying the business model of those surveillance-as-a-service companies.
• me-vs-cat 1y ago
  > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. Does it have to be? What if selling more than 1,000 license plates with location and time in any calendar year starts down a path of increasingly severe penalties proportional to the gross income gained? What are the negative ramifications that I'm missing which would be hard to solve by following how other laws work? Example: If you exclude location but effectively have an agreement with someone else that sells corresponding location data, then you can both be found guilty with a penalty multiplier for attempting to evade the law. We write laws against stalking individuals, and we can write laws against similar behavior towards groups.
• waltwalther 1y ago
  The solution, from a personal privacy standpoint, could be to obscure your license plate to prevent a proper photograph from being taken. I have read of invisible film and transparent sprays that purport to do just this. There are also very affordable "license plate flippers" which, at the push of a button, rotate both your front and rear plates to different plates. Both of these methods are likely illegal for driving, but may be legal when parked on private property.
• TitaRusell 1y ago
  There is no solution. A large part of the population wants a borderline fascist dictatorship that hunts down brown people.