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We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans

305 points by jchrisa 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago
“If anyone can get this information, that’s getting into Big Brother,” he told Ars. “If I was trying to look at what my spouse is doing, [I could]. To me, that is something that is kind of scary. Why do they allow people to release this without a law enforcement reason? Searching it or accessing the information should require a warrant.” The state collecting this info in the first place is a parallel with Big Brother. The state handing out the data to anyone that asks is not.
- EGreg 12y ago
  Agree. Data is going to be collected anyway. If it's going to help anyone, perhaps it should help everyone. To level the playing field. I am all for more transparency when it comes to altercations with cops for instance. Body camera footage!!
ProAm 12y ago
People should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in society and this seems to go directly against the grain of that belief.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Since cars do not have rights, nor do the plates, the reasoning is they are not violating your personal privacy. Courts and Police have so twisted the law as to deprive our rights by stripping our association with our property. Sadly they can simply initiate forfeiture against property still protected by the law. There hasn't been sufficient push back to stop this erosion. Worse there isn't sufficient push back against government agencies holding back information which they are bound by law to surrender.
  - PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    It is interesting, that you mention forfeiture. In my opinion it is one of the biggest examples, how governments twist basic personal rights that are normally protected by the constitution. Recently, I also learnt that even in the Magna Carta (1215 BC) the property of a "free person" was protected against the grasp of the potentate. When modern governments now disable this basic right by legal trickery, than we in essence loose our freedom.
  - pc86 12y ago
    > Since cars do not have rights, nor do the plates, the reasoning is they are not violating your personal privacy. Is that really the justification, though? The only justification I've heard is that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when driving down a public road. It has nothing to do with you v. your property or the fact that your license plate does not have constitutional rights. The courts have agreed that you can't mindlessly swap out a police officer for a computer, save all the data and keep going as you were, but that doesn't change the fact that you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
innguest 12y ago
- people vote for cops to track license plates "for security", "for the children", "don't complain if you have nothing to hide" - libertarians complain "you don't know who will be in power tomorrow and (mis)use this data or allow for its misuse" - some company comes along and buys the data off the cops because those in power let them. Maybe those in power when the law for collecting this data passed promised that this data wouldn't ever be shared, but now it's someone else or they changed their mind because fuck the people.
- rikkus 12y ago
  We'll never get clear statistics on this, but at some point it will be possible to start making judgements on whether keeping this data (and making it available to the public) is a net negative or positive. My gut tells me that it's a negative, but my head tells me there is, or will be, no real way to stop it being collected, even if it's not public bodies doing the collection.
  - picks_at_nits 12y ago
    > even if it's not public bodies doing the collection There already are private companies that drive around scanning license plates and selling access to the data. One of their “use cases” is selling the data to “repo men.”
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Are there dedicated vehicles doing it? I had the idea that tow trucks were using the scanners and sharing data, I hadn't heard about anything dedicated to plate scanning. Edit: This article mentions "purpose-built camera cars": http://www.caranddriver.com/features/screen-plate-club-how-license-plate-scanning-compromises-your-privacy-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/screen-plate-club-how-l...
    - rikkus 12y ago
      That's the sort of thing I was expecting to happen. Ouch.
EGreg 12y ago
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
midnightclubbed 12y ago
The only good thing to come out of this story is that Ars was able to do a public records request and get access to the data. Having the data available to anyone who wants it opens up enough privacy concerns and potential abuse outside of the 'good guys' that hopefully someone in the city realises it should stop spying on it's citizens. Unfortunately the fix will likely be to continue the surveillance and to bar public access to the data.
EA 12y ago
Been flying a drone over landfills for a year now. I'm taking high resolution photographs of all the address labels I can find. Wrote a script to do OCR on the photographs and then export that into an Access Database. Been mailing out flyers to positives asking folks to do better recycling.
- JTon 12y ago
  Whoa. Cool. What motivated you to start doing this? Got a write up about it?
- akerl_ 12y ago
  Do you check for your own flyers in landfills?
  - avn2109 12y ago
    too... meta... does not compute
  - hamburglar 12y ago
    Ooh, and he can send another one that says "second notice" (or third, etc) without actually needing to store data on each recipient. :P
- avalaunch 12y ago
  So you're mailing a bunch of flyers to people you know don't recycle? The project is cool but that struck me as particularly ironic, assuming your intention is to help minimize waste.
  - omgitstom 12y ago
    Maybe his flyers are biodegradable made from plant cellulose. You never know!
    - willis77 12y ago
      He probably fedex overnights them on 32lb bond California Redwood sourced stationary.
danso 12y ago
This is great that the Oakland PD acquiesced to the request...it appears old Excel spreadsheets is a common way for the camera-tech contractors to store and disseminate the information. A couple years ago, MuckRock made a request for Boston PD's records, and received one spreadsheet (in error) that had 65,536 records: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/dec/15/boston-police-close-alpr-program/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/dec/15/boston-po...
cmsmith 12y ago
It seems to me that we need the legal system to recognize computer-processed 'big data' as what it is, which is a totally new kind of information that doesn't fit neatly into our existing privacy framework. I think it's good that this technology exists (especially if my car were to be stolen), but I don't see how it would be harmful to the public interest to require police to get a warrant before looking me up. Of course there are edge cases, where it's hard to draw the line between automated and semi-automated data collection, but that's why we have judges. However, it is troubling that this new technology is hitting its stride during a time which is not great for privacy rights in general.
- iak8god 12y ago
  > I think it's good that this technology exists (especially if my car were to be stolen), but I don't see how it would be harmful to the public interest to require police to get a warrant before looking me up. The most justified uses for this seem to be those where your car is stolen, or suspected to be involved in a crime, or otherwise of interest for an ongoing investigation. Since there's no reason to store this data indefinitely for any of those uses, it seems like erasing non-matches within 24 hours or so would be a good way to address many of the privacy concerns. On the other hand, if the goal is now to collect as much data as possible about everyone just in case it turns out to be useful later, then things seem to be going according to plan.
  - ScottBurson 12y ago
    Agreed -- non-matches must not be stored indefinitely. 24 hours might be a bit on the short side; I could see letting them keep them for 30 days, but no more than that.
  - kbenson 12y ago
    Some crimes aren't even discovered for weeks or months afterwards. For example, a dumped body. There's definitely a trade-off, 24 hours seems too low to me, multiple months too long. 15 to 30 days sounds about right.
    - 12y ago
nly 12y ago
> "you should support restrictions on how long law enforcement agents can store this data, and who can access it, and under what circumstances." Or better yet, start opposing its collection... if you're under the speed limit no authority has a good reason to keep track of where you're going and when.
ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
Did the article ever mention if Ars is making this data public? I couldn't find a reference to it.
tomswartz07 12y ago
If you're curious, like I was- this is what the License Plate Readers look like: http://police-praetorian.netdna-ssl.com/VigilantVid-PR-Feb.jpg http://police-praetorian.netdna-ssl.com/VigilantVid-PR-Feb.j... I have seem them before but I originally thought these devices were some sort of radar speedometer or something.
danielharan 12y ago
An ideal tool for stalkers. I am sympathetic that this data could be useful for law enforcement - however this data must not be released wholesale to the public and there should be limits to how long it is stored.
- mytochar 12y ago
  This was /exactly/ the situation that I was going to write a thought about, though I replaced stalkers with abusive ex-relationship partners for a more visible display of concern (and admittedly an appeal to more extreme possibility)
will_brown 12y ago
I am all for privacy, but...it is not a reasonable expectation of privacy that your car and/or license plate will not be photographed while on the road (at least according to US law). There is an entire body of law regarding reasonable expectation of privacy vis-a-vis 4th Amendment search and seizure. If nothing else, even if one does not personally agree with the jurisprudence, then they might find it informative to know what the police may or may not search/seize without a warrant, probable cause and/or reasonable suspicion.
- donutdan4114 12y ago
  Privacy isn't a one-size-fits-all type of thing. I think there is an inherit difference between reading license plates that are publicly visible on the roadway versus tracking license plates over time and storing that data for a long enough period that someone can deduce even more personal information from it. If you were to say "is it okay to read license plates and check a stolen vehicle registry" I don't think many people would complain. But if you were to ask, "Is it okay that i know where you live and work and hang out on a regular basis by just reading your license plate," that's a different story. If they just erased the data after a few days that would take care of most privacy concerns that people have.
- a3n 12y ago
  It's a different thing entirely when the government has data, particularly when that data traces your life. The guy standing on the corner waving a "We buy gold" sign seeing my car/plate is unlikely to be able to do anything with that data. But the government recording my whereabouts can draw me into any sort of investigation they like, based on correlated but not necessarily cause-related data. It's very different. At the least, the government is our servant, not our adversary, and we're supposed to be able to limit and direct what they do. Just because the can do something does not automatically give them the right, particularly if we've told them they can't. Unfortunately they do see themselves as our adversary, and so the question of whether we actually have given them the right to do something is often arguable.
- fragmede 12y ago
  > (at least according to US law). Have a citation? There's a difference between a human police officer who is, well, human, and a robot who has eyes in the back of their head, and remembers every single license plate they've ever seen in the past two years. The Supreme court agreed, in United States v. Jones, that technology has changed things, and GPS trackers or license plate readers are fundamentally different than having a law enforcement officer do it the 'old fashioned way', especially because data storage is so cheap these days. New Hampshire has completely banned automated license plate readers, and Maine, New Jersy and Virginia have already put limits on the license plate readers.
hyperliner 12y ago
And this, my friends, is where our liberty died: “Doesn’t bother me personally,” said Jon Kaufman, an Oakland resident. “I have nothing to hide.”
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- patio11 12y ago
  This is one of those cases where it's largely a matter of degree. For example, as a longstanding matter of American jurisprudence, a police officer doesn't need to do anything at all to justify looking at you in public. This makes sense to our traditional expectations of how a police officer would actually do that, with the Mk 1 Eyeball. He'd probably be physically present somewhere, either coincidentally seeing something legally relevant, or else have particularized suspicions about a particular person/location/etc and do Good Old Fashioned Police Work to see who they talked to / who went in / etc etc. However, given sufficiently widely distributed cameras and facial recognition, one can imagine "looking at you in public" being carried out not by particular officer but by a for loop. On everybody. All the time. Retrospective since whenever the system started slurping in everything, all the time. And that's not the American expectation, and not just for the paranoid set. "Should the cops have access to a database which, for any citizen, would trivially be able to answer the questions a) where they go to church, b) what private residences they entered and at what frequencies, c) what building they were in at 4:30 PM on last Tuesday?" is positively spine-chilling to virtually the entirety of the American polity. I know privacy debates on HN are frustrating, as they're often carried out in primarily by invective among a sliver of the population who have already staked out the most extreme possible position and are busy trying to vote each other off the island for insufficient extremism. That said, frustration at the HN privacy climate probably shouldn't spill over to "All claims of law enforcement overreach are ludicrous."
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Society may be able to keep data out of the hands of our own government without a warrant but there is virtually no chance of enforcing anything like that on private citizens, companies and other countries with the current rate of technological advance. Privacy, at least in public spaces, is a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. I don't think people even realize that credit card transactions including location are blithely bought and sold everyday.
  - 12y ago
gregors 12y ago
instruction manual for Pagis/Boss https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/delaware/alprpra_ncc_newcastlecountyde.pdf https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/delaware/alprpra_n...
eck 12y ago
1. Alice installs app on smartphone. Alice puts smartphone in cradle on dashboard. Smartphone captures license plates Alice drives by on way to work. Alice drives by Bob. 2. Carol goes to website. Carol enters Bob's license plate number. Website says, "25 hits found. Enter credit card number to see times and locations". Carol enters credit card. Carol finds Bob. 3. Alice gets some of Carol's money, since she took the photos. Why is that not a thing yet? License plate reading, unlike, say, tapping undersea fiber, is not something you need either a government's resources or a government's ability to skirt the law to do. This is easy stuff.
- fixermark 12y ago
  That will end up becoming an interesting court case, followed by a set of laws, followed by a court case, until such a thing is almost certainly illegal (in the United States), by pressure of societal desire alone. One could do something similar with facial recognition software, but if someone tried to make a large business out of it, I'm sure there would be significant friction.
  - redstripe 12y ago
    Which is why it should be done in the most outrageous fashion by someone who cares about privacy. Maybe that's what is needed to get people to realize just what the next decade or two have in store.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      You're trying to get the frog to jump out of the pot before it is too late but you're underestimating the degree to which it has already become drowsy.
  - balabaster 12y ago
    there may be significant friction and even laws against it, but the government, behind closed doors would pay you a significant sum for your company to continue doing it and I would wager would lobby the government to pass bills to not only make it legal, but protect its legality.
xai3luGi 12y ago
Is it illegal to put infrared LEDs around your license plate to obscure it to these cameras?
- warmwaffles 12y ago
  Yes. It can be considered tampering with evidence in an "ongoing" operation. I too have thought of this for radar guns and laser speed guns. But most of these sensors know when they are being jammed and can actually result in the FCC finding you and fining you.
  - bmohlenhoff 12y ago
    Radar guns are regulated by the FCC because they are RF sources. They aren't going to come after you for mounting extra lightbulbs on your car. Infrared bulbs are more similar to polarized plastic covers that obscure the plate when viewed from certain directions. Not sure if they are illegal or not but they are definitely outside the purview of the FCC.
  - 15155 12y ago
    That's incorrect, at least in the United States. Nowhere in the United States of America are 'citations' sent by - usually private - speed/red light cameras considered criminal offenses. Know why? They barely stand the requirements for civil infractions in most areas. Typically these 'tickets' are implemented as backwards preconditions-to-vehicle-registration. ---- Actively jamming radar is a crime and could possibly net you trouble. Light? IR? No such 'unlawful interference' law exists at the federal level. You might be violating a state statute, but that's the extent of it. Interfering with a civilly-implemented speed/red light camera via use of plate-obscuring equipment on your vehicle might be a state-level offense but it wouldn't be for long if challenged.
- eli 12y ago
  I'm sure it depends where you live, but probably not. Maybe this is of interest: http://www.photoblocker.com/photoshield-cover.html http://www.photoblocker.com/photoshield-cover.html
- 12y ago
gregors 12y ago
Oakland PD ALPR data interactive map https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1dEEIyxvxaN4upYLz835XnfO-fC1ZVy86AY3wz7zd#map:id=3 https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1dEEIyx... raw data https://www.eff.org/files/2015/01/20/oakland_pd_alpr.csv https://www.eff.org/files/2015/01/20/oakland_pd_alpr.csv found here http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2015/01/what-you-can-learn-from-oaklands-raw-alpr-data-2594762.html http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2015/01/what-you-can-le...
mschuster91 12y ago
It's bad enough the state collects and retains this data. It's even worse that this kind of data can legally be obtained by FOIA. I'm all for transparency, but not where it touches the privacy of individuals. btw, I have no particular problem with plate scanners as long as no-hits are not stored for longer than 7 days and any searches on the data heap are authorized by a judge (e.g. to gather data in a murder case).
- zaroth 12y ago
  I think the best part of the story is that they could do the FOIA. The data is not somehow magically safe from misuse because the press can't see it. In fact, quite the opposite.
zaroth 12y ago
Collecting this data on the general public should not be legal. If you are a suspect in an active investigation it is completely different, but you must be actively identified, you shouldn't be able to do what LA did and simply say "everyone is a suspect". I think you have to take these technologies to their logical conclusion, because Moore's law will ultimately take it there. A camera recording every plate, everywhere it goes, stored for all time. That's not a database any people should allow their government to keep, warrant or not. I'm glad they quoted the 2012 USA v Jones GPS tracking case, because this is exactly the same thing with an even lower cost per vehicle tracked. Ultimately I want Congress to pass a law putting limits on the data retention, but obviously that's not going to happen any time soon.
jumby 12y ago
Simply stated: Plate != Person To get to "Person" you need to have a permissible purpose that is already protected under the DPPA (a federal law) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...]

305 points by jchrisa 12y ago

“If anyone can get this information, that’s getting into Big Brother,” he told Ars. “If I was trying to look at what my spouse is doing, [I could]. To me, that is something that is kind of scary. Why do they allow people to release this without a law enforcement reason? Searching it or accessing the information should require a warrant.” The state collecting this info in the first place is a parallel with Big Brother. The state handing out the data to anyone that asks is not.

EGreg 12y ago
Agree. Data is going to be collected anyway. If it's going to help anyone, perhaps it should help everyone. To level the playing field. I am all for more transparency when it comes to altercations with cops for instance. Body camera footage!!

ProAm 12y ago

People should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in society and this seems to go directly against the grain of that belief.

Shivetya 12y ago
Since cars do not have rights, nor do the plates, the reasoning is they are not violating your personal privacy. Courts and Police have so twisted the law as to deprive our rights by stripping our association with our property. Sadly they can simply initiate forfeiture against property still protected by the law. There hasn't been sufficient push back to stop this erosion. Worse there isn't sufficient push back against government agencies holding back information which they are bound by law to surrender.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  It is interesting, that you mention forfeiture. In my opinion it is one of the biggest examples, how governments twist basic personal rights that are normally protected by the constitution. Recently, I also learnt that even in the Magna Carta (1215 BC) the property of a "free person" was protected against the grasp of the potentate. When modern governments now disable this basic right by legal trickery, than we in essence loose our freedom.
- pc86 12y ago
  > Since cars do not have rights, nor do the plates, the reasoning is they are not violating your personal privacy. Is that really the justification, though? The only justification I've heard is that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when driving down a public road. It has nothing to do with you v. your property or the fact that your license plate does not have constitutional rights. The courts have agreed that you can't mindlessly swap out a police officer for a computer, save all the data and keep going as you were, but that doesn't change the fact that you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in public.

innguest 12y ago

- people vote for cops to track license plates "for security", "for the children", "don't complain if you have nothing to hide" - libertarians complain "you don't know who will be in power tomorrow and (mis)use this data or allow for its misuse" - some company comes along and buys the data off the cops because those in power let them. Maybe those in power when the law for collecting this data passed promised that this data wouldn't ever be shared, but now it's someone else or they changed their mind because fuck the people.

rikkus 12y ago
We'll never get clear statistics on this, but at some point it will be possible to start making judgements on whether keeping this data (and making it available to the public) is a net negative or positive. My gut tells me that it's a negative, but my head tells me there is, or will be, no real way to stop it being collected, even if it's not public bodies doing the collection.
- picks_at_nits 12y ago
  > even if it's not public bodies doing the collection There already are private companies that drive around scanning license plates and selling access to the data. One of their “use cases” is selling the data to “repo men.”
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Are there dedicated vehicles doing it? I had the idea that tow trucks were using the scanners and sharing data, I hadn't heard about anything dedicated to plate scanning. Edit: This article mentions "purpose-built camera cars": http://www.caranddriver.com/features/screen-plate-club-how-license-plate-scanning-compromises-your-privacy-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/screen-plate-club-how-l...
  - rikkus 12y ago
    That's the sort of thing I was expecting to happen. Ouch.

EGreg 12y ago

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

midnightclubbed 12y ago

The only good thing to come out of this story is that Ars was able to do a public records request and get access to the data. Having the data available to anyone who wants it opens up enough privacy concerns and potential abuse outside of the 'good guys' that hopefully someone in the city realises it should stop spying on it's citizens. Unfortunately the fix will likely be to continue the surveillance and to bar public access to the data.

EA 12y ago

Been flying a drone over landfills for a year now. I'm taking high resolution photographs of all the address labels I can find. Wrote a script to do OCR on the photographs and then export that into an Access Database. Been mailing out flyers to positives asking folks to do better recycling.

JTon 12y ago
Whoa. Cool. What motivated you to start doing this? Got a write up about it?
akerl_ 12y ago
Do you check for your own flyers in landfills?
- avn2109 12y ago
  too... meta... does not compute
- hamburglar 12y ago
  Ooh, and he can send another one that says "second notice" (or third, etc) without actually needing to store data on each recipient. :P
avalaunch 12y ago
So you're mailing a bunch of flyers to people you know don't recycle? The project is cool but that struck me as particularly ironic, assuming your intention is to help minimize waste.
- omgitstom 12y ago
  Maybe his flyers are biodegradable made from plant cellulose. You never know!
  - willis77 12y ago
    He probably fedex overnights them on 32lb bond California Redwood sourced stationary.

danso 12y ago

This is great that the Oakland PD acquiesced to the request...it appears old Excel spreadsheets is a common way for the camera-tech contractors to store and disseminate the information. A couple years ago, MuckRock made a request for Boston PD's records, and received one spreadsheet (in error) that had 65,536 records: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/dec/15/boston-police-close-alpr-program/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/dec/15/boston-po...

cmsmith 12y ago

It seems to me that we need the legal system to recognize computer-processed 'big data' as what it is, which is a totally new kind of information that doesn't fit neatly into our existing privacy framework. I think it's good that this technology exists (especially if my car were to be stolen), but I don't see how it would be harmful to the public interest to require police to get a warrant before looking me up. Of course there are edge cases, where it's hard to draw the line between automated and semi-automated data collection, but that's why we have judges. However, it is troubling that this new technology is hitting its stride during a time which is not great for privacy rights in general.

iak8god 12y ago
> I think it's good that this technology exists (especially if my car were to be stolen), but I don't see how it would be harmful to the public interest to require police to get a warrant before looking me up. The most justified uses for this seem to be those where your car is stolen, or suspected to be involved in a crime, or otherwise of interest for an ongoing investigation. Since there's no reason to store this data indefinitely for any of those uses, it seems like erasing non-matches within 24 hours or so would be a good way to address many of the privacy concerns. On the other hand, if the goal is now to collect as much data as possible about everyone just in case it turns out to be useful later, then things seem to be going according to plan.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  Agreed -- non-matches must not be stored indefinitely. 24 hours might be a bit on the short side; I could see letting them keep them for 30 days, but no more than that.
- kbenson 12y ago
  Some crimes aren't even discovered for weeks or months afterwards. For example, a dumped body. There's definitely a trade-off, 24 hours seems too low to me, multiple months too long. 15 to 30 days sounds about right.
  - 12y ago

nly 12y ago

> "you should support restrictions on how long law enforcement agents can store this data, and who can access it, and under what circumstances." Or better yet, start opposing its collection... if you're under the speed limit no authority has a good reason to keep track of where you're going and when.

ZanyProgrammer 12y ago

Did the article ever mention if Ars is making this data public? I couldn't find a reference to it.

tomswartz07 12y ago

If you're curious, like I was- this is what the License Plate Readers look like: http://police-praetorian.netdna-ssl.com/VigilantVid-PR-Feb.jpg http://police-praetorian.netdna-ssl.com/VigilantVid-PR-Feb.j... I have seem them before but I originally thought these devices were some sort of radar speedometer or something.

danielharan 12y ago

An ideal tool for stalkers. I am sympathetic that this data could be useful for law enforcement - however this data must not be released wholesale to the public and there should be limits to how long it is stored.

mytochar 12y ago
This was /exactly/ the situation that I was going to write a thought about, though I replaced stalkers with abusive ex-relationship partners for a more visible display of concern (and admittedly an appeal to more extreme possibility)

will_brown 12y ago

I am all for privacy, but...it is not a reasonable expectation of privacy that your car and/or license plate will not be photographed while on the road (at least according to US law). There is an entire body of law regarding reasonable expectation of privacy vis-a-vis 4th Amendment search and seizure. If nothing else, even if one does not personally agree with the jurisprudence, then they might find it informative to know what the police may or may not search/seize without a warrant, probable cause and/or reasonable suspicion.

donutdan4114 12y ago
Privacy isn't a one-size-fits-all type of thing. I think there is an inherit difference between reading license plates that are publicly visible on the roadway versus tracking license plates over time and storing that data for a long enough period that someone can deduce even more personal information from it. If you were to say "is it okay to read license plates and check a stolen vehicle registry" I don't think many people would complain. But if you were to ask, "Is it okay that i know where you live and work and hang out on a regular basis by just reading your license plate," that's a different story. If they just erased the data after a few days that would take care of most privacy concerns that people have.
a3n 12y ago
It's a different thing entirely when the government has data, particularly when that data traces your life. The guy standing on the corner waving a "We buy gold" sign seeing my car/plate is unlikely to be able to do anything with that data. But the government recording my whereabouts can draw me into any sort of investigation they like, based on correlated but not necessarily cause-related data. It's very different. At the least, the government is our servant, not our adversary, and we're supposed to be able to limit and direct what they do. Just because the can do something does not automatically give them the right, particularly if we've told them they can't. Unfortunately they do see themselves as our adversary, and so the question of whether we actually have given them the right to do something is often arguable.
fragmede 12y ago
> (at least according to US law). Have a citation? There's a difference between a human police officer who is, well, human, and a robot who has eyes in the back of their head, and remembers every single license plate they've ever seen in the past two years. The Supreme court agreed, in United States v. Jones, that technology has changed things, and GPS trackers or license plate readers are fundamentally different than having a law enforcement officer do it the 'old fashioned way', especially because data storage is so cheap these days. New Hampshire has completely banned automated license plate readers, and Maine, New Jersy and Virginia have already put limits on the license plate readers.

hyperliner 12y ago

And this, my friends, is where our liberty died: “Doesn’t bother me personally,” said Jon Kaufman, an Oakland resident. “I have nothing to hide.”

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

patio11 12y ago
This is one of those cases where it's largely a matter of degree. For example, as a longstanding matter of American jurisprudence, a police officer doesn't need to do anything at all to justify looking at you in public. This makes sense to our traditional expectations of how a police officer would actually do that, with the Mk 1 Eyeball. He'd probably be physically present somewhere, either coincidentally seeing something legally relevant, or else have particularized suspicions about a particular person/location/etc and do Good Old Fashioned Police Work to see who they talked to / who went in / etc etc. However, given sufficiently widely distributed cameras and facial recognition, one can imagine "looking at you in public" being carried out not by particular officer but by a for loop. On everybody. All the time. Retrospective since whenever the system started slurping in everything, all the time. And that's not the American expectation, and not just for the paranoid set. "Should the cops have access to a database which, for any citizen, would trivially be able to answer the questions a) where they go to church, b) what private residences they entered and at what frequencies, c) what building they were in at 4:30 PM on last Tuesday?" is positively spine-chilling to virtually the entirety of the American polity. I know privacy debates on HN are frustrating, as they're often carried out in primarily by invective among a sliver of the population who have already staked out the most extreme possible position and are busy trying to vote each other off the island for insufficient extremism. That said, frustration at the HN privacy climate probably shouldn't spill over to "All claims of law enforcement overreach are ludicrous."
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Society may be able to keep data out of the hands of our own government without a warrant but there is virtually no chance of enforcing anything like that on private citizens, companies and other countries with the current rate of technological advance. Privacy, at least in public spaces, is a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. I don't think people even realize that credit card transactions including location are blithely bought and sold everyday.
- 12y ago

gregors 12y ago

instruction manual for Pagis/Boss https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/delaware/alprpra_ncc_newcastlecountyde.pdf https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/delaware/alprpra_n...

eck 12y ago

1. Alice installs app on smartphone. Alice puts smartphone in cradle on dashboard. Smartphone captures license plates Alice drives by on way to work. Alice drives by Bob. 2. Carol goes to website. Carol enters Bob's license plate number. Website says, "25 hits found. Enter credit card number to see times and locations". Carol enters credit card. Carol finds Bob. 3. Alice gets some of Carol's money, since she took the photos. Why is that not a thing yet? License plate reading, unlike, say, tapping undersea fiber, is not something you need either a government's resources or a government's ability to skirt the law to do. This is easy stuff.

fixermark 12y ago
That will end up becoming an interesting court case, followed by a set of laws, followed by a court case, until such a thing is almost certainly illegal (in the United States), by pressure of societal desire alone. One could do something similar with facial recognition software, but if someone tried to make a large business out of it, I'm sure there would be significant friction.
- redstripe 12y ago
  Which is why it should be done in the most outrageous fashion by someone who cares about privacy. Maybe that's what is needed to get people to realize just what the next decade or two have in store.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    You're trying to get the frog to jump out of the pot before it is too late but you're underestimating the degree to which it has already become drowsy.
- balabaster 12y ago
  there may be significant friction and even laws against it, but the government, behind closed doors would pay you a significant sum for your company to continue doing it and I would wager would lobby the government to pass bills to not only make it legal, but protect its legality.

xai3luGi 12y ago

Is it illegal to put infrared LEDs around your license plate to obscure it to these cameras?

warmwaffles 12y ago
Yes. It can be considered tampering with evidence in an "ongoing" operation. I too have thought of this for radar guns and laser speed guns. But most of these sensors know when they are being jammed and can actually result in the FCC finding you and fining you.
- bmohlenhoff 12y ago
  Radar guns are regulated by the FCC because they are RF sources. They aren't going to come after you for mounting extra lightbulbs on your car. Infrared bulbs are more similar to polarized plastic covers that obscure the plate when viewed from certain directions. Not sure if they are illegal or not but they are definitely outside the purview of the FCC.
- 15155 12y ago
  That's incorrect, at least in the United States. Nowhere in the United States of America are 'citations' sent by - usually private - speed/red light cameras considered criminal offenses. Know why? They barely stand the requirements for civil infractions in most areas. Typically these 'tickets' are implemented as backwards preconditions-to-vehicle-registration. ---- Actively jamming radar is a crime and could possibly net you trouble. Light? IR? No such 'unlawful interference' law exists at the federal level. You might be violating a state statute, but that's the extent of it. Interfering with a civilly-implemented speed/red light camera via use of plate-obscuring equipment on your vehicle might be a state-level offense but it wouldn't be for long if challenged.
eli 12y ago
I'm sure it depends where you live, but probably not. Maybe this is of interest: http://www.photoblocker.com/photoshield-cover.html http://www.photoblocker.com/photoshield-cover.html
12y ago

gregors 12y ago

Oakland PD ALPR data interactive map https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1dEEIyxvxaN4upYLz835XnfO-fC1ZVy86AY3wz7zd#map:id=3 https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1dEEIyx... raw data https://www.eff.org/files/2015/01/20/oakland_pd_alpr.csv https://www.eff.org/files/2015/01/20/oakland_pd_alpr.csv found here http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2015/01/what-you-can-learn-from-oaklands-raw-alpr-data-2594762.html http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2015/01/what-you-can-le...

mschuster91 12y ago

It's bad enough the state collects and retains this data. It's even worse that this kind of data can legally be obtained by FOIA. I'm all for transparency, but not where it touches the privacy of individuals. btw, I have no particular problem with plate scanners as long as no-hits are not stored for longer than 7 days and any searches on the data heap are authorized by a judge (e.g. to gather data in a murder case).

zaroth 12y ago
I think the best part of the story is that they could do the FOIA. The data is not somehow magically safe from misuse because the press can't see it. In fact, quite the opposite.

zaroth 12y ago

Collecting this data on the general public should not be legal. If you are a suspect in an active investigation it is completely different, but you must be actively identified, you shouldn't be able to do what LA did and simply say "everyone is a suspect". I think you have to take these technologies to their logical conclusion, because Moore's law will ultimately take it there. A camera recording every plate, everywhere it goes, stored for all time. That's not a database any people should allow their government to keep, warrant or not. I'm glad they quoted the 2012 USA v Jones GPS tracking case, because this is exactly the same thing with an even lower cost per vehicle tracked. Ultimately I want Congress to pass a law putting limits on the data retention, but obviously that's not going to happen any time soon.

jumby 12y ago

Simply stated: Plate != Person To get to "Person" you need to have a permissible purpose that is already protected under the DPPA (a federal law) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...]