10 ms·

Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

115 points by fstutzman 13y ago

sp332 13y ago
states including Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of ALPRs, and New Hampshire has banned them outright. Good to know, and just another reason to live in NH :)
draugadrotten 13y ago
The battle for privacy is already lost. David Brin's approach is what is remaining. THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY.
- jkldotio 13y ago
  It would certainly be useful to have all elite interactions (not the content) available in real-time to link with a revision controlled legal system. I.e. you could follow particular clauses in laws back to particular legislators, even in the early drafting process, and then see who they or their staff were talking to at that time (and potentially demand the content of those communications). But I believe the Bush administration used a private/party email system to stop their communications coming under the current Whitehouse rules. So any such system would have to include everything, a kind of lifelogging for anyone during their period in government. I am sure they will object to this with the usual arguments about security implications and executive right. Amusingly citizens could reply "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
  - gcr 13y ago
    Invading the privacy of politicians doesn't sound like a good idea. It will only convince the qualified candidates, especially those who are (themselves) concerned about privacy, to not go into that field. It will also make politicians used to the idea of ubiquitous privacy invasion. "Oh, see? I can live just fine underneath this," they think, "so why can't the general public?"
- jacquesm 13y ago
  > The battle for privacy is already lost. Over my dead body it is.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Posting from the grave?
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    (Shrug) It might take that long, but it will happen nevertheless.
- betterunix 13y ago
  People still need privacy. Businesses need to keep their strategies, market research, trade secrets, etc. secret to remain competitive. The police need to keep secret the identities of undercover agents, planned evidence gathering, etc. In many places, homosexuals must keep their relationships and desires secret, or else become social outcasts (or worse). For all the talk about how privacy is dead, the reality is that normal adults have secrets and would be very angry if those secrets were revealed.
cbhl 13y ago
In the Toronto, Ontario area, ALPRs were built into the 407 Electronic Toll Route to accompany the RFID readers. This eliminated the need for toll booths entirely, because the license plate reader could be used to find the car's registration and send a bill. Of course, there are slightly different semantics here -- the ALPRs in the 407 are stationary (mounted at every on-ramp and off-ramp), and you can choose to avoid them by simply using other roads running in parallel to the toll road. However, this tech is at least a decade old (the 407 was first opened in 1997). It seems odd to me that people are up in arms about the tech now, especially since you can build a rudimentary ALPR with just a webcam and the right image processing algorithms.
- Amadou 13y ago
  > It seems odd to me that people are up in arms about the tech now, especially since you can build a rudimentary ALPR with just a webcam and the right image processing algorithms. That is precisely why people are up in arms. What was once rare is now ubiquitous. When every police car has an ANPR capable of reading 60+ plates per minute and is feeding plate numbers plus timestamps and gps coordinates into a backend database with poorly defined access controls the potential for abuse skyrockets.
corresation 13y ago
But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recording costs close to nothing. Capacity is endless. Processing and OCR is achieved with negligible power on tiny, low-cost devices. Imagine what tomorrow will be like? Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.
- girvo 13y ago
  I think it should be embraced... but transparent. Let me see when someone has looked up those details, let me view all my own records. Only then can the balance of power shift ever so slightly back towards regular people.
- sp332 13y ago
  Intentionally building a database whose sold purpose is to track tens of millions of mostly-innocent people as they go about their business for years on end is a bad idea.
  - corresation 13y ago
    Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated. Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end. And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement. Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).
jerrya 13y ago
I am not a lawyer. I found Professor Orin Kerr's discussion of United States v. Jones (2012) at the Volokh Conspiracy both enlightening and depressing. Professor Kerr's analysis there, if I recall it correctly, was that any violation occurred when the GPS device was physically placed on Jones' car violating the seizure part of unreasonable search and seizure. That the search itself was legal. And I think that's how the government's attorney and Scalia and the Court saw it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)) But presumably according to Kerr, and I am very likely distorting his views since a) I ain't a lawyer and b) sometime has passed, that if the same tracking information against Jones was obtained by having ALPR devices mounted on city street lights, freeway overpasses and freeway ramps, then Jones (and us!) would have no more expectation of privacy than if Jones had been seen by a cop walking a beat. I think there is a fundamental difference between a cop walking a beat recognizing a citizen and having an array of massively cheap cameras hooked into an ALPR network tracking all citizens 24x7.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  There is a massive difference. But that's not the point. There is a societal benefit to tracking people this way. Well, there is expected to be one - of road pricing, congestion and crime reduction. The handling of loss of privacy, which seems pretty much inevitable, is something we do need to deal with - just not try to stop it.
GigabyteCoin 13y ago
I have never liked the idea of them but couldn't put my finger on the "why". Thanks, EFF.
emeidi 13y ago
Maybe we should switch off our smartphones first? Who cares about OCRing number plates if you can track an individual's EVERY move using his mobile phone data?
jumby 13y ago
You have no right to privacy on a public street. Nor is your tag non-public information.
copperthrowaway 13y ago
This is just a throwaway account. I actually work on a system like this, including creating and training specialty neural networks for a state I will not name. Although it sounds like California's DB is a lot more sophisticated in the amount of data it captures and the amount of data mining that they plan to happen, it's hard to imagine that more states aren't doing things like we're doing. My department works directly with law enforcement as basically an R&D arm of state/local police. The extent of our work on this particular domain is mostly limited to running automated NCIC checks on the licenses (reveals warrants and stolen cars) - not really tracking total location and piecing together where this car has been in the past (though that probably could be gleaned with a few well-defined db queries).
danjones 13y ago
The issue isn't license plate readers, it's data retention. They certainly have a valid point about the need for limits on data retention however I feel they're going too far in demanding "public disclosure of the actual license plate data [(a week’s worth)]" just to highlight the issue. For reference on how this is handled in other countries take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  Gooooood point. Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with. I really wish they had just used that bloody system to look for hits on wanted and stolen vehicles. That's fine, everyone's ok with that. Mass collection and tracking of every single car that gets recorded? Why did they have to torpedo such a useful technology by doing something so stupid?
  - notahacker 13y ago
    Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with. That's the point the EFF is trying to make, but it's also absurd. It would obviously be dangerous for them to release their donors' credit card details in public (or even store them in a non-encrypted database and non-PCI compliant manner), but that's an argument for limiting who has access to how much of the records and not an argument that credit cards and financial transactions data shouldn't exist.
6d0debc071 13y ago
> Law enforcement agencies claim that ALPR systems are no different from an officer recording license plate, time and location information by hand. Sure, if the officer thought several thousand times faster and had an encyclopedic memory. In practice it's like having an entire team of officers hanging around on the street corner noting down the numberplates of every single car. And people would, I think, find that far more objectionable. Having large amounts of law enforcement in any area tends to put people's backs up. There's a difference of degree going on. People may allow the occasional surveillance, but it was occasional - and because it was relatively expensive it was liable to be used for reasonably good reasons. It doesn't really seem a great idea to have these systems in place as a matter of routine. And there's a worrying liberty angle to the whole thing too - in many ways how advanced a society is seems like it can be judged by the degree of privacy that it allows its members. The need to confirm that everyone's following the rules, acting appropriately, smacks of tribalism and oppression. Inevitably we're going to have the ability, but that doesn't imply the will. And seeing these things actualised is consequently rather troubling.
nooneelse 13y ago
Does a license plate, legally speaking, have to be visible when the car is parked? If not, then covering it would be a stop-gap against cops driving through a parking lot and collecting the info on who is in that area.
- blocking_io 13y ago
  Covering up your licence plate would be a really great way to attract the attention of the police.
csmatt 13y ago
We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :) I actually started doing some experimenting with IR LEDs since they emit light outside the visible spectrum, but do show up on cameras (as long as the cameras don't have an IR filter). The LEDs just weren't powerful enough. There is this http://www.nophoto.com/ http://www.nophoto.com/
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  >We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :) I was about to post the same thing. This is a technological problem, it could do with a technological solution: We need a way to make sure that license plates are not machine readable. Or maybe this: Make them explicitly machine readable, but then have the vehicle alert the owner when something reads it. So instead of a license plate you have a radio transceiver with a range of a few hundred yards, which broadcasts the vehicle's make and model and allows anyone to request the VIN. You can request the VIN with a mobile device but every request gets logged and notifies the vehicle owner, and making a request would require probable cause by law. Everyone in the U.S. will soon have a mobile device anyway (if only one without a data plan that was discarded by someone with more money and only used for wifi), so this actually serves the original purpose of a license plate better than existing license plates do, because you can read the VIN from a vehicle after witnessing a violation of the law even if it's at an angle that you couldn't have read the plate or is far enough away that you couldn't have made it out. On the other hand, it prevents passive surveillance or surveillance without probable cause, which has always been a misfeature of license plates outside of their original purpose.
johnschrom 13y ago
In Minneapolis, they started collecting and retaining ALPR data, but the sunshine laws hadn't caught up to the retention period. So, one of my buddies made a request for all of the data, and it was fulfilled. If anybody is interested in playing with ALPR data, we put it up on github but removed the license plate numbers: https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data
squozzer 13y ago
Imagine what would happen if we had technology that made breaking the law impossible. I don't mean top-down Orwellian-style tech, but bottom-up. Behold, the Legal Singularity. Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.
- chii 13y ago
  true freedom mean the freedom to knowingly break laws. with out that freedom, it isn't truly free...
malbs 13y ago
Here in Australia there is a move towards this same technology. Vehicle registration stickers are being phased out because the registration of vehicles are auto queried by police vehicles, RTA cameras, etc I'm pretty happy about this because I don't drive. I ride a bicycle, and the two times I've been involved in a genuine aggressive altercation with another vehicle, the car had stolen license plates. One of those times the police had planned to charge the passenger with attempted murder (We were both travelling south, I was going about 25 km/h, they pulled in close beside me, and opened the car door into me). When it turned out the license plate was stolen/hadn't been registered for 10 years, I was at a loss as to why anyone would want to drive around with stolen plates on their car (me being a law abiding citizen), and the police said it's to avoid speed cameras and to steal petrol (turn up to petrol station, fill up, drive off). Apparently petrol theft is like one of the number one crimes here

115 points by fstutzman 13y ago

sp332 13y ago

states including Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of ALPRs, and New Hampshire has banned them outright. Good to know, and just another reason to live in NH :)

draugadrotten 13y ago

The battle for privacy is already lost. David Brin's approach is what is remaining. THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY.

jkldotio 13y ago
It would certainly be useful to have all elite interactions (not the content) available in real-time to link with a revision controlled legal system. I.e. you could follow particular clauses in laws back to particular legislators, even in the early drafting process, and then see who they or their staff were talking to at that time (and potentially demand the content of those communications). But I believe the Bush administration used a private/party email system to stop their communications coming under the current Whitehouse rules. So any such system would have to include everything, a kind of lifelogging for anyone during their period in government. I am sure they will object to this with the usual arguments about security implications and executive right. Amusingly citizens could reply "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
- gcr 13y ago
  Invading the privacy of politicians doesn't sound like a good idea. It will only convince the qualified candidates, especially those who are (themselves) concerned about privacy, to not go into that field. It will also make politicians used to the idea of ubiquitous privacy invasion. "Oh, see? I can live just fine underneath this," they think, "so why can't the general public?"
jacquesm 13y ago
> The battle for privacy is already lost. Over my dead body it is.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Posting from the grave?
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  (Shrug) It might take that long, but it will happen nevertheless.
betterunix 13y ago
People still need privacy. Businesses need to keep their strategies, market research, trade secrets, etc. secret to remain competitive. The police need to keep secret the identities of undercover agents, planned evidence gathering, etc. In many places, homosexuals must keep their relationships and desires secret, or else become social outcasts (or worse). For all the talk about how privacy is dead, the reality is that normal adults have secrets and would be very angry if those secrets were revealed.

cbhl 13y ago

In the Toronto, Ontario area, ALPRs were built into the 407 Electronic Toll Route to accompany the RFID readers. This eliminated the need for toll booths entirely, because the license plate reader could be used to find the car's registration and send a bill. Of course, there are slightly different semantics here -- the ALPRs in the 407 are stationary (mounted at every on-ramp and off-ramp), and you can choose to avoid them by simply using other roads running in parallel to the toll road. However, this tech is at least a decade old (the 407 was first opened in 1997). It seems odd to me that people are up in arms about the tech now, especially since you can build a rudimentary ALPR with just a webcam and the right image processing algorithms.

Amadou 13y ago
> It seems odd to me that people are up in arms about the tech now, especially since you can build a rudimentary ALPR with just a webcam and the right image processing algorithms. That is precisely why people are up in arms. What was once rare is now ubiquitous. When every police car has an ANPR capable of reading 60+ plates per minute and is feeding plate numbers plus timestamps and gps coordinates into a backend database with poorly defined access controls the potential for abuse skyrockets.

corresation 13y ago

But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recording costs close to nothing. Capacity is endless. Processing and OCR is achieved with negligible power on tiny, low-cost devices. Imagine what tomorrow will be like? Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.

girvo 13y ago
I think it should be embraced... but transparent. Let me see when someone has looked up those details, let me view all my own records. Only then can the balance of power shift ever so slightly back towards regular people.
sp332 13y ago
Intentionally building a database whose sold purpose is to track tens of millions of mostly-innocent people as they go about their business for years on end is a bad idea.
- corresation 13y ago
  Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated. Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end. And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement. Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).

jerrya 13y ago

I am not a lawyer. I found Professor Orin Kerr's discussion of United States v. Jones (2012) at the Volokh Conspiracy both enlightening and depressing. Professor Kerr's analysis there, if I recall it correctly, was that any violation occurred when the GPS device was physically placed on Jones' car violating the seizure part of unreasonable search and seizure. That the search itself was legal. And I think that's how the government's attorney and Scalia and the Court saw it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)) But presumably according to Kerr, and I am very likely distorting his views since a) I ain't a lawyer and b) sometime has passed, that if the same tracking information against Jones was obtained by having ALPR devices mounted on city street lights, freeway overpasses and freeway ramps, then Jones (and us!) would have no more expectation of privacy than if Jones had been seen by a cop walking a beat. I think there is a fundamental difference between a cop walking a beat recognizing a citizen and having an array of massively cheap cameras hooked into an ALPR network tracking all citizens 24x7.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago
There is a massive difference. But that's not the point. There is a societal benefit to tracking people this way. Well, there is expected to be one - of road pricing, congestion and crime reduction. The handling of loss of privacy, which seems pretty much inevitable, is something we do need to deal with - just not try to stop it.

GigabyteCoin 13y ago

I have never liked the idea of them but couldn't put my finger on the "why". Thanks, EFF.

emeidi 13y ago

Maybe we should switch off our smartphones first? Who cares about OCRing number plates if you can track an individual's EVERY move using his mobile phone data?

jumby 13y ago

You have no right to privacy on a public street. Nor is your tag non-public information.

copperthrowaway 13y ago

This is just a throwaway account. I actually work on a system like this, including creating and training specialty neural networks for a state I will not name. Although it sounds like California's DB is a lot more sophisticated in the amount of data it captures and the amount of data mining that they plan to happen, it's hard to imagine that more states aren't doing things like we're doing. My department works directly with law enforcement as basically an R&D arm of state/local police. The extent of our work on this particular domain is mostly limited to running automated NCIC checks on the licenses (reveals warrants and stolen cars) - not really tracking total location and piecing together where this car has been in the past (though that probably could be gleaned with a few well-defined db queries).

danjones 13y ago

The issue isn't license plate readers, it's data retention. They certainly have a valid point about the need for limits on data retention however I feel they're going too far in demanding "public disclosure of the actual license plate data [(a week’s worth)]" just to highlight the issue. For reference on how this is handled in other countries take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...

GhotiFish 13y ago
Gooooood point. Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with. I really wish they had just used that bloody system to look for hits on wanted and stolen vehicles. That's fine, everyone's ok with that. Mass collection and tracking of every single car that gets recorded? Why did they have to torpedo such a useful technology by doing something so stupid?
- notahacker 13y ago
  Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with. That's the point the EFF is trying to make, but it's also absurd. It would obviously be dangerous for them to release their donors' credit card details in public (or even store them in a non-encrypted database and non-PCI compliant manner), but that's an argument for limiting who has access to how much of the records and not an argument that credit cards and financial transactions data shouldn't exist.

6d0debc071 13y ago

> Law enforcement agencies claim that ALPR systems are no different from an officer recording license plate, time and location information by hand. Sure, if the officer thought several thousand times faster and had an encyclopedic memory. In practice it's like having an entire team of officers hanging around on the street corner noting down the numberplates of every single car. And people would, I think, find that far more objectionable. Having large amounts of law enforcement in any area tends to put people's backs up. There's a difference of degree going on. People may allow the occasional surveillance, but it was occasional - and because it was relatively expensive it was liable to be used for reasonably good reasons. It doesn't really seem a great idea to have these systems in place as a matter of routine. And there's a worrying liberty angle to the whole thing too - in many ways how advanced a society is seems like it can be judged by the degree of privacy that it allows its members. The need to confirm that everyone's following the rules, acting appropriately, smacks of tribalism and oppression. Inevitably we're going to have the ability, but that doesn't imply the will. And seeing these things actualised is consequently rather troubling.

nooneelse 13y ago

Does a license plate, legally speaking, have to be visible when the car is parked? If not, then covering it would be a stop-gap against cops driving through a parking lot and collecting the info on who is in that area.

blocking_io 13y ago
Covering up your licence plate would be a really great way to attract the attention of the police.

csmatt 13y ago

We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :) I actually started doing some experimenting with IR LEDs since they emit light outside the visible spectrum, but do show up on cameras (as long as the cameras don't have an IR filter). The LEDs just weren't powerful enough. There is this http://www.nophoto.com/ http://www.nophoto.com/

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
>We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :) I was about to post the same thing. This is a technological problem, it could do with a technological solution: We need a way to make sure that license plates are not machine readable. Or maybe this: Make them explicitly machine readable, but then have the vehicle alert the owner when something reads it. So instead of a license plate you have a radio transceiver with a range of a few hundred yards, which broadcasts the vehicle's make and model and allows anyone to request the VIN. You can request the VIN with a mobile device but every request gets logged and notifies the vehicle owner, and making a request would require probable cause by law. Everyone in the U.S. will soon have a mobile device anyway (if only one without a data plan that was discarded by someone with more money and only used for wifi), so this actually serves the original purpose of a license plate better than existing license plates do, because you can read the VIN from a vehicle after witnessing a violation of the law even if it's at an angle that you couldn't have read the plate or is far enough away that you couldn't have made it out. On the other hand, it prevents passive surveillance or surveillance without probable cause, which has always been a misfeature of license plates outside of their original purpose.

johnschrom 13y ago

In Minneapolis, they started collecting and retaining ALPR data, but the sunshine laws hadn't caught up to the retention period. So, one of my buddies made a request for all of the data, and it was fulfilled. If anybody is interested in playing with ALPR data, we put it up on github but removed the license plate numbers: https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data

squozzer 13y ago

Imagine what would happen if we had technology that made breaking the law impossible. I don't mean top-down Orwellian-style tech, but bottom-up. Behold, the Legal Singularity. Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.

chii 13y ago
true freedom mean the freedom to knowingly break laws. with out that freedom, it isn't truly free...

malbs 13y ago

Here in Australia there is a move towards this same technology. Vehicle registration stickers are being phased out because the registration of vehicles are auto queried by police vehicles, RTA cameras, etc I'm pretty happy about this because I don't drive. I ride a bicycle, and the two times I've been involved in a genuine aggressive altercation with another vehicle, the car had stolen license plates. One of those times the police had planned to charge the passenger with attempted murder (We were both travelling south, I was going about 25 km/h, they pulled in close beside me, and opened the car door into me). When it turned out the license plate was stolen/hadn't been registered for 10 years, I was at a loss as to why anyone would want to drive around with stolen plates on their car (me being a law abiding citizen), and the police said it's to avoid speed cameras and to steal petrol (turn up to petrol station, fill up, drive off). Apparently petrol theft is like one of the number one crimes here