4 ms·
The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight. >
by Aurornis 8mo ago
The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight.
> her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.”
The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?
- throwawaytea 8mo agoThere are companies that scan every parked car visible in any public accessible spot.
- mmmlinux 8mo agoThe real question is why do they only sell information to services designed to cause harm.
- idle_zealot 8mo agoWho else would buy it? What use exists for this data that isn't harmful to society?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kube-system 8mo agoFinding missing people? Finding criminals?
- razingeden 8mo ago“Find me the missing person, and I’ll find the crime.” — Lavrentiy Beria (Probably)
- throwawaytea 8mo agoPeople not returning vehicles to the banks, or commiting fraud by taking up resources in districts they don't live in are technically criminals.
- kube-system 8mo agoThere are, in fact, many crimes
- throwaway27448 8mo agoDiscouraging people from using cars at all?
- bregma 8mo agoCatching the pedophiles. Think of the children.
- goatlover 8mo agoAs long as theyrw not in the Epstein Class.
- mindslight 8mo agoMore like catching the children. Think of the pedophiles.
- browsingonly 8mo agoRepossessing cars isn't societally harmful, quite the opposite in fact.
- JuniperMesos 8mo agoIf it was not possible or even just much harder to repossess a car, lenders would be much less willing to grant loans to people in order to buy a car.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoPrivate Investigators; vindictive ex-lovers; spiteful law enforcement; personal vendettae; abortion tracking... ...some combination of all of the above?!
- throwawaytea 8mo agoReturning a vehicle to a bank that someone has stopped paying for isn't exactly harm. If banks were unable to get vehicles back, people with bad credit would have a much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo ago>much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place. This is a good thing; add "houses" to the list, too. Credit is too freely issued — we live on debt (as a society/world). I've seen people throw their $20k in negative equity into a new purchase/lease — and just been baffled. --but I agree: lenders oughta'be able to retrieve their lien'ed properties.
- quickthrowman 8mo agoRepossessing collateral on a secured loan is not a service designed to cause harm.
- mmmlinux 8mo agoThere are A LOT of throwaways talking about repossessing cars in this comment. that's a little weird. Guess I struck a nerve at some company.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoe.g. at BigBox Mart towtrucks will traverse the parking lanes, with ALPR cameras quickly detecting repos to snatch. My car is paid for but I just don't display a license plate period (in my US state it's only a $10 fine to not).
- xxpor 8mo ago>My car is paid for but I just don't display a license plate period Which of course draws a bunch attention to you regardless.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoIt's not about hiding — it's about sending a message. IIRC, Steve Jobs was known to do this in his black plateless Mercedes (decades ago).
- jauntywundrkind 8mo agoWired even wrote this up (2010). Getting a new lease every 6 months, which apparently legally let him go plateless somehow. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/the-mystery-of-steve-jobs-plateless-benz/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/the-mystery-of-steve-jobs-plat... I found it pretty grossly offensive a practice.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo agoI lived nearish to him during this era, and after this article was published, it seemed like every black Mercedes in town started going tagless.
- tbyehl 8mo agoIt really doesn't, there are lawful reasons to not have a plate yet.
- ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
- kotaKat 8mo agoFun fact: Motorola Solutions sells LPRs not only to law enforcement (via Vigilant Solutions), they also sell them via the "Digital Recognition Network" arm to third party companies - tow operators, private operations, and so on. Some of the largest customers of DRN are banks, especially sub-prime lenders :) https://drndata.com/about/ https://drndata.com/about/ https://drndata.com/news/motorola-solutions-acquires-vaas-international-holdings-leader-in-data-and-image-analytics-for-vehicle-location/ https://drndata.com/news/motorola-solutions-acquires-vaas-in... And all of them... feed right into the greater LEARN (Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network) system that the feds and company have access to at all times.
- Zigurd 8mo agoThis isn't the Motorola that makes phones. Lenovo owns Motorola Mobility. But America kept the highly profitable business of building a surveillance state. Yay.
- john_strinlai 8mo agomore concerning than overnight, in my opinion, is monitoring it in summer months when school is presumably out and keeping a record of it for who knows how long.
- HexPhantom 8mo agoThe scary part isn't a single camera, it's the aggregation
- overfeed 8mo agoI've often thought to spook legislators by crowd-sourcing this and scaling it. Any member if of the public can upload dashcam footage, and can search any number plate captured by the network: including legislators, town councilors and school board members. Access is gated by uploading dashcam and having it corroborated by other footage to avoid faked footage, e.g. cross-checking license plates in the same area. My concerns are the decision makers may rake the wrong lesson from this, my own moral injury, and/or legal exposure when this information is inevitably used to harm someone. Also, Law enforcement would happily co-opt this service. Perhaps making the searches themselves public would alleviate same of the challenges.
- phil21 8mo agoI've thought about doing this, but ironically you'd be sued into oblivion where I'm from. Likely prosecuted by the both the state and city attorney for violating privacy laws already on the books. Yet somehow Flock is deploying cameras everywhere. My system would have been much more open on purpose. Like the private bittorrent tracker of security cams. You stream footage to the centralized cloud for aggregation, and get access to the full dataset in return. Perhaps with some "ratios" built in to incentivize sharing like you do for seeders vs. leechers on the BT network. It's a fascinating technical problem - but the legal minefield is crazy even if you're doing it as a form of protest. I also think the lessons would be lost on the general public. If anything, it would result in laws that made such things only legal for private licensed companies or some such - I'd simply be assisting in furthering regulatory capture.
- overfeed 8mo ago> Likely prosecuted by the both the state and city attorney for violating privacy laws already on the books. Recording in places where there is no expectations of privacy is legal, and it would be very useful to establish case law that establishes that scaling up can impugn privacy. I selfishly don't want to be a defendant since I can't afford it, but if I won the lottery jackpot, this is what I'd be working on.
- runjake 8mo agoIt's covered in the article. The school district has a contract with Thompson Reuters Clear. And here's more general information on that service: https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/leveraging-license-plate-recognition-lpr-data-for-enhanced-corporate-security/ https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/leveraging-license-pla... Key bit: "With LPR intelligence tools such as Thomson Reuters license plate recognition, corporate crime professionals have the ability to share and request the sharing of commercial LPR data with other corporations." Eg. Flock and Vigilant Solutions. https://losgatan.com/class-action-suit-against-flock-license-readers-cites-los-gatan/ https://losgatan.com/class-action-suit-against-flock-license... https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260227692233/en/Flock-License-Plate-Cameras-Face-Class-Action-Lawsuit-by-Gibbs-Mura-A-Law-Group https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260227692233/en/Flo...
- goatlover 8mo agoShouldn't be information the school district has a right to access. It's none of their business where a person's car is parked over night. I really hope society pushes back on surveillance.
- runjake 8mo agoIt seems like overreach, to say the least.
- ikr678 8mo agoChicken and egg - this is a symptom of inequality in the schooling system. The school is trying to defend a particular status quo. If your schools were funded differently (eg not from hyper-local district property taxes, maybe redistributed equally at the state level), parents would feel less pressure to compete for 'better' school positions.
- Gud 8mo agoThis is information that SHOULDNT EXIST.
- dwaltrip 8mo agoThat’s fucking crazy.
- dghlsakjg 8mo agoThe craziest part of this is that a school district thinks that the overnight location of the vehicle used to transport a student has anything to do with the location of the residence. Especially when that data is from a time period when the school isn't in session. I can think of a half dozen valid scenarios why the vehicle used for school drop off is parked away from the student's residence at night. e.g. Vehicle belongs to a non-custodial parent from out of district who handles drop off. Vehicle is used by a household member to do overnight shift work. Family just moved, of course their vehicle wasn't being parked in the district in July. ALPR character recognition error. Parent and student live elsewhere in the summer, and still qualify as residents within the district. It sometimes boggles the mind the amount of inflexibility that people doing these jobs have/are willing to use, especially in something so consequential.