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I'm curious - how exactly would one refute the following argument put forth by data brokers and repo agents? > But Digital Recognition and other so-called “dat

• iamsalman 13y ago
  Come to think of it -- humans can't memorize all the number plates they see. Machines can. It's the "recording" of these images (though there for everyone to see) which takes us into the gray area.
  • chiph 13y ago
    In addition, the problem most people don't recognize with this, is the database keeps a history of where the car has been seen. This history is ripe data for divorce attorneys who can use it to show that assignations at motels took place. Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems - I had a neighbor who split up because the Google car photographed a motorcycle in their driveway that wasn't the husbands.
    • mseebach 13y ago
      > Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems No, affairs can cause marital problems. Technology just makes it easier to get caught This is not a vindication of the technology in question, but it can't be blamed for everything. I can't help but think that cheating business travellers had it a lot easier before the advent of ubiquitous, near-free mobile long distance telephony made it easier for spouses to keep tabs on the travelling partner. That doesn't make telephony a cause of marital problems.
      • TeMPOraL 13y ago
        I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour. Lying to people is a bad idea; some people mistakenly believe that they can lie freely without others knowing, and then cry foul when new technologies threaten that belief. Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation; technology only allows us to look at this web faster and in more detail, and thus spot more inconsistencies in our model (i.e. lies). It's not the fault of technology if you lied and got caught.
        • the_ancient 13y ago
          under that logic we should all be implanted with a sensor the records audio video of everything we see, say, and hear, as well as providing real time location data. After all you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.... right
          • TeMPOraL 13y ago
            No, this does not follow. Also, "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" is only partially not true, and I think it deserves pointing out. If you have nothing to hide, then you only have to fear evil people (who may want to harm you, and the more they know about you the easier it gets) and morons (who jump to conclusions).
        • PeterisP 13y ago
          the_ancient - under that logic, I should be allowed to record what I hear, and if I catch you ever lying to me or breaking your verbal promises, you won't be able to deny that.
          • dntrkv 13y ago
            Go for it. Nothing is stopping you from doing that. It's just people will think you're a weirdo for doing it.
  • sudomal 13y ago
    I'm imagining a future where most cameras have Street View style blurring in their hardware. Where vintage digital cameras are sought after and illicit manufacturers produce unauthorised copies with the feature disabled.
    • Crito 13y ago
      I have a picture of my cars license plate in my phone for convenient access. Furthermore, if I am ever in a fender bender I want to have the ability to photograph everything, with license plates unblurred.
  • gnerd 13y ago
    I don't know. People are unlikely to remember the license plate (unless it strikes an obvious pattern) but a person who was so inclined could write numbers down manually and store them indefinitely a bit like a CPU with no storage mechanism simply would hold the data in volatile memory... unless we plug in a hard drive.
• _delirium 13y ago
  This issue that individual observations usually seen as benign become concerning when aggregated at computational scales is coming up in government surveillance as well. It is fairly uncontroversial that the police reading your license plate as they walk by your car isn't a 4th-amendment violation: it's not a "search" to view the exterior of a car parked on a public street. But is it still okay if the police start tracking the movements of all cars around the city using a network of license plate readers? Many people would be wary of that, but it's not clear what the difference in kind is or where a line could be drawn. In the government case, the "mosaic theory of the 4th amendment" is an attempt to produce a new rule that certain aggregations of non-search data become searches when aggregated, so it may require a warrant to track you around the city with a network of license-plate readers, while it doesn't require a warrant to look at the exterior of your car normally. It's a bit fuzzy, though, and not clear it will survive (or be practical to administer). And it's not clear whether something analogous should or could be done for private collectors of data. And of course if it isn't, then that's an easy loophole for the government too: the government can just buy the data from the private data collectors. Under current law, at least, the government buying data lawfully collected by a private party who willingly sells it isn't considered a search, and doesn't require a warrant.
• lone-star 13y ago
  It's not so much the scanning of plates which is invading privacy. I wouldn't mind them scanning my plate just to check when a car entered or exited a parking lot. The problem is saving and matching this data to actual people. Then selling this information to corporations and PIs.
• berberous 13y ago
  The scan of the license plan is not really the issue, it's the collecting of the scan, tagging it with GPS, and aggregating the scan into large, permanent databases that can be accessed by both government and private corporations. If all you do is scan a plate and display "car payments past due", or discard the scan if the car is not wanted, it's not all that different from a human looking for a car. But these folks are creating historical databases that capture everywhere you have ever been. These sorts of databases can be mined retroactively to discover all sorts of sensitive information, similar to what was pointed out by Justice Sotomayor in the recent GPS tracking case, U.S. v. Jones: "GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person's public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. See, e.g., People v. Weaver, 12 N. Y. 3d 433, 441-442, 909 N. E. 2d 1195, 1199 (2009) ("Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on"). The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future." While the government can currently look up your license plate information, or track you manually, they are limited by their resources. (From Alito's opinion in U.S. v. Jones: "But it is almost impossible to think of late- 18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case. Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach's owner?") A nationwide database of historical location information -- that may not currently require a warrant under the 4th amendment to access -- is ripe for abuse. Letting private companies access the data is also scary. These data brokers are probably right that they don't currently violate any privacy laws, however. But that just means we need to change the laws, as I think this most definitely needs to be a violation of privacy.
  • gnerd 13y ago
    I think the real interesting thing about this isn't any of these questions but really, much like with the internet, when does an IP become a person (or in this example, when does a license plate become a person)? Is there a legal distinction? As I understood it, the reason you don't lose points on your license if you get caught by a speed camera in an automated fashion, is because technically, legally, they have to prove it was you in the car (but to charge a fine, they just have to prove it was your car and it violated a traffic law). So if you think of it in that context, then how can I be sure it was you at all for those "sensitive" situations? If I can't be sure it was you, and the information was public (where you had no expectation of privacy in the first place), then is that information as protected as say, your medical records? (No really, I'm asking).
• bertil 13y ago
  iamsalman offers a great response. Legally (and conceptually) there is the idea of a collection, a compilation being valuable in and on itself: this has been enforced to prevent people from selling phone books and TV programs without paying the original ‘compilers’, phone companies and TV stations, not as operators but original authors of an exhaustive description. Collecting changes useless information into, anecdotes, into a usable product: that’s the whole point of those companies, they (presumably by contract) guarantee a return rate that makes them economically sound; that changes the nature of ‘looking around’. This idea is essential to all the creep factor around Google’s recurrent controversy: the problem is not taking street pictures, but guaranteeing that any house can be seen by anyone; it's not to murmur in your boss's ear ‘that’s the sub-commissioner in grey’ but potentially matching anyone’s face to their full public history. This is what made every page of a phone book precious, and every post-it with a phone number on it worthless.
  • maxerickson 13y ago
    U.S. law has moved away from that idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural But it should still be straightforward to make laws saying that the tags on a vehicle are a particular type of information and then restrict the way that businesses are allowed to use it.
    • bertil 13y ago
      Indeed on the copyright of collection -- which as a fact was abused; but not the change of nature of the information. I really don’t think that you can make enough information particular enough to get away with disanonymisation techniques: you standing anywhere in a city, with a block accuracy is enough to identify most people on a transport map; even whether you like a handful of movies, and in what order or when you saw them is enough to isolate individuals from a VoD database.
      • maxerickson 13y ago
        A company can make use of the observations without aggregating them. For instance, if they have a documented interest in a tag, I don't really have a problem with them disseminating it to their vehicles and checking it against live scans.
• belorn 13y ago
  Its not about invading privacy, but rather about illegal handling of private and sensitive information. The information about who is where and when is information that should be treated in similar way as credit cards numbers, medical information, and so on. Repo agents do not actually need to store this for their businesses, so their argument is easy refuted by simply denying their ability to profit by selling sensitive information about peoples private life.
  • PeterisP 13y ago
    If I'm walking on a public street, then that isn't private information - unlike medical information that's entrusted to some specific people bound by restrictions, what happens on the street is public data. And I'm perfectly allowed to say "hey, you know what? Yesterday I saw Belorn walking down that street!" no matter if you want to hide that - it's not dissemination of private and sensitive information.
    • belorn 13y ago
      If you feel so, I hope you don't mind if someone like the police create live 24/7 tracking of your position. Any driving, any movement... always tracked. If don't consider that a intrusion of your privacy, then that is up to you.
    • graylights 13y ago
      I agree public street is public info. But it sounds like they're scanning more then public street. At what point does it become private? 1. Parked on a public street in front of my home 2. Parked on private parking lot at my apartment 3. Parked in my driveway 4. Parked in my garage with door open. 5. Parked in my garage but visible through window if you angle the camera just right.
      • PeterisP 13y ago
        I believe that question has been asked many times in courts and is settled long ago. Your examples 1.-4. would be treated as "in plain view" (if seen from standing on that public street) and 5. wouldn't.
• rmc 13y ago
  Just cause something is publically visible doesn't mean it's not private. Privacy is about control of the data, not whether the data is visible in public or inside private property. By taking, storing and cataloging the data, they, not the car owner, now have some control over what happens to the data. Hence it's an invasion of privacy of the car owner.
• bsder 13y ago
  Simple, I have a database wherein I scan the license plates of all known repo men and upload their current whereabouts. That way when they enter the neighborhood, I can stop and have a chat with them. Now see the issue?
  • gregimba 13y ago
    I sense a new startup to track police officers.