I'm in Taiwan right now, and they use license plate readers to associate plates in parking lots with the parking ticket you receive to track the time you're in the mall. Sure you could use it as metadata for human analytics, but in this case I'm pretty certain its current use is for reducing queues and making checkin and checkout of parking lots more efficient.
I feel like there is a fine line between pure technology advanced convenience and actually big brother style monitoring. In Taiwan if you drop trash where you shouldn't there's a chance that a camera will capture your movement, and they will try to find out who that person is.
In China, I assume it's the same, but because of the way it's set up it gives you more of a prison feeling. At least that's what I felt like to me in Pudong, Shanghai.
What I'm saying is how can we make sure that we get the convenience part without the pervasive big brother aspect. I'm sure there is a way and I believe that's what we should focus on as technically moves on.
Similarly, the same applies to things such as medical records.
Good point. It would become dramatically more useful if netizens just ran license plate scanners on their dashboards that regular report the timestamped geodata of marked/government vehicles.
Automated license plate readers spring to mind. The police have been noting license plates forever, automate it and suddenly now you have a database that tracks everyone's movements.
> It's less about the technology about license-plate reading and more about what people do with the data afterwards.
As someone who cares very much about probably I think this is a point that cannot be stressed enough. It is mostly about storage. Storing things is the major danger. Of course there are use cases too, and I would feel uncomfortable with the police tracking every car on the 5 freeway, but tracking requires storage.
Honestly I think your parking garage example is a great use. I can think of others. A notification of your friend or family member pulling into your driveway. Have your house do things like turn on the lights or give you a notification. It could be a good way to do parking meters. I'm sure people could think of more. Technology always has two sides to the coin, it's always a balance of using it only for ethical things. But that requires nuance.
Edit: a cool way to use these might be like we use passwords. Your license plate is a password (or let's say username). OCR is used to identify the plate, then it hashes it, checks the hash with that in the database and bingo, door opens. I think that's a level of privacy most of us are comfortable with. There's no retention of the license plate, no good way to identify who's it is, and if the database is hacked the attacker doesn't get your plate.
In a sense, nothing has changed by having these readers--your license plate was always visible. There was nothing stopping the city from hiring people to stand on a street corner and record the plate numbers that passed by.
Except the practicality of it, of course.
Im not going for or against it, it's just an interesting consideration of information being available, but unused.
We keep seeing this happen with arrest records, face recognition, etc. These are things that were always available, but technology simply made them more convenient or available at scale, even though nothing fundamental had changed.
One of the most common uses of this tech in the US is automatic license plate readers.
Without getting into a debate about expectations of privacy on public roads vs. building a perpetual government database that tracks where every car is effectively at all times of day, another application of this tech would be a bumper decal.
I think most reasonable people would agree obscuring the license plate on a public road is not the solution (well, with the exception of Florida Man who racked up a $1MM fine when he was finally caught doing that through toll booths for a year), but a decal like this wouldn't interfere with any officer's human duties.
I don't have a huge problem with individuals running license plate readers, since that is necessarily limited in scope. I meant that it's a bit of a dystopic view to assume that the government should be allowed to have their license plate readers and use them to accumulate massive databases that track the position of every car on every road.
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).
License plates have seen such an enormous mission creep, starting out by enforcing safety inspections and liability for car accidents and finding stolen cars, and continuing down to letting the public and private sectors routinely track motorists' whereabouts.
When license plates were introduced, the technology to make them more privacy-protective didn't exist. Today, it might, but it would be expensive to switch and challenging to get police to give up monitoring powers they've become accustomed to.
A few years ago NSW Police had several cars fitted with Automatic number plate recognition and after a year of use they already had read more license plates than people living in that state.
I don't necessarily mind police using this for their benefit, but not long ago we didn't have all this technology and information so easily available. So there must be oversights and appropriate usage, or we are just giving them unfettered access. Warrants should have to be obtained to get this sort of information, I think.
I agree that this part is scary, but it isn't news.
I first heard about license-plate readers back in 2008, and at that point police could already take a wired-up squad car for a cruise through a grocery store parking lot, scanning a couple hundred plates. Onboard software would run the numbers for outstanding warrants or lapsed registrations, and alert the officer.
This has already been going on for years. The capacity to mine that data effectively is slightly more recent, but I'm sure the logfiles exist.
So what are alternative ways to catch criminals? Wait for them to show up at the police station? There's a big difference between mass surveillance and surveillance. I want cops to be able to do their job. I don't want my information collected to be used against me in a crime I haven't yet committed. This is the NSA debate: warrants should be required for a suspect that is under suspicion; but not everyone should be mass surveilled "just in case."
I would feel better about this if the license plate readers simply pinged law enforcement on a real-time match. The storage and potential data mining aspects are where it crosses the line. Stasi stuff there.
I don't think oversight policies are nearly enough. The intrusion into your privacy is scary enough, even without marrying it to state-sanctioned violence. And automated license plate reading is quite possible with consumer electronics, which means that the only reason why things aren't getting tracked is that it's not profitable to track it yet.
You're on to something with automated license plate readers. They exist, as do apps that take pictures and videos and aggregate the license plate numbers.
Credit card transactions also aren't protected from marketing tracking activities, neither are Twitter or Facebook ads, neither is what my isp can discover from my dns requests, cell phone providers can sell my location metadata, and the credit bureaus are ordinary businesses with huge data leaks.
This is public information, police can operate on it without a warrant, and whether we're driving, flying a private jet, walking in a town square, or purchasing a coffee, or browse the internet - other private entities can too.
LifeLock and identity theft protection are sold to everybody, tax forms allow anybody to try to use someone else's number - the government refuses to do anything, and companies have minimum privacy + security requirements.
Maybe someone should assemble and open-source a license plate reader we can all carry — crowd-source pushing packets to a web site where cars + licenses are displayed on a map.
It would more or less make the data egalitarian, make some kind of point maybe?
I'm actually not averse to license plate readers. I'm not a privacy absolutist. I lean toward the privacy where you have the "expectation of privacy" but I could be convinced license plate readers cross that line.
License plate scanners are actually just scanning everyone so there is no slippery slope involved. Right now we are all being watched. It's a pure cost issue; camera + OCR + database lookup is really cheap so just tag everyone.
Is there any implication here when it comes to using traffic cameras or vehicle-mounted plate scanners to monitor vehicle location? Or will they just switch to doing that more often?
In some ways that seems more broadly invasive than GPS, in that it captures information about thousands of individuals who aren't being specifically observed.
I think that's totally missing the point of the article. The license plates are being used to track where every person goes over a long period of time, which can uncover some very private information about people, like whether the person is cheating on their spouse, or sees a psychiatrist on a weekly basis.
And yes, you can find this out just by physically following someone wherever they go, but since that's impractical to do on a mass scale, it's not likely to be done for people who aren't targets of specific criminal investigations. License plate scanning collects this personal information indiscriminately about totally innocent people.
And this information is likely to be abused by people in positions of power, just like existing records about people are. I can't count how many times have I've heard about cops getting in trouble for running unauthorized database searches on ex-girlfriends, etc. Detailed data about a person's every movement would be even more tempting to abuse.
"Police can be alerted automatically in real time when a wanted individual passes by one of the devices. Agencies around the country have been affixing the machines to the outside of patrol cars and receive an in-car notification if they come upon a license plate connected to a wanted felon or stolen vehicle. Vast amounts of historical data also may be searched and used to map where someone has been, making the intelligence value of license-plate readers attractive to law enforcement."
I feel like there is a fine line between pure technology advanced convenience and actually big brother style monitoring. In Taiwan if you drop trash where you shouldn't there's a chance that a camera will capture your movement, and they will try to find out who that person is.
In China, I assume it's the same, but because of the way it's set up it gives you more of a prison feeling. At least that's what I felt like to me in Pudong, Shanghai.
What I'm saying is how can we make sure that we get the convenience part without the pervasive big brother aspect. I'm sure there is a way and I believe that's what we should focus on as technically moves on.
Similarly, the same applies to things such as medical records.
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