Can you provide a source for that last paragraph (the cars uploading GPS traces and cops asking for logs)? I'm interested in knowing more, e.g. which country this happens in, are there any checks and balances, is this constitutional?
I work in the public safety domain. You don’t even need a tracker on vehicles. There are several camera startups in this space, such as Flock Safety, which can scan for plates and particular vehicle descriptions and alert law enforcement. These devices are more common than you think. Agencies can also enter data sharing agreements. I work on the consuming end of data from systems like this.
When they installed license-plate scanners on bridges, government buildings, and roaming police cars, there was initially the claim that this system wouldn't be used to create a giant centralized database tracking everybody's movement.
We all know how that turned out.
And now with these airplane-style black boxes inside cars (the manufacturers have their own black boxes, too) ... I'm sure the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc would never start drinking from this firehose of data, and mis-use it.
I'm sure Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, etc would find this info useful, too ... although with the installed user base of Android phones, Google / Apple pretty likely already have quite a bit of this info.
Is this news? I'm genuinely asking - TLO and other skip tracing tools have been around for a while, and have been offering license plate location data for years.
The ACLU issued a report on how ALPR devices are used to track people in July 2013 (1).
Flock Safety (2) was founded in 2017 and has raised $381M from name-brand VCs like Tiger Global and A16Z. The ACLU raised concerns about them a year ago in a report. (3)
Ars 'creeped' out a couple of people by getting the license location data and doing look ups on people's plates. So yes, they may not be able to track everyone every where, but if someone wanted to know where 'you' were going it would be trivial to figure out. I'm not as worried about police and the .gov having the data. I'm more worried about when 'bad' people get access to that data and use it for nefarious purposes.
See the Federal security clearance hack for an example.
I'm surprised about the fact that cars are collecting real-time location data at all. Am I being tracked in US too? I don't remember I read any privacy policy when I bought my car.
My thoughts exactly. It would be almost trivial to find out where someone has driven their car after committing a crime. I'm curious to see what might happen if they deploy these in US cities.
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.
Not sure why this is being downvoted, it is an actual thing:
“Several companies operate independent, non-law enforcement ALPR databases, contracting with drivers to put cameras on private vehicles to collect the information.”
“DRN is a private surveillance system crowdsourced by hundreds of repo men who have installed cameras that passively scan, capture, and upload the license plates of every car they drive by to DRN's database. DRN stretches coast to coast and is available to private individuals and companies focused on tracking and locating people or vehicles.”
I feel I should point out that California has been installing license plate readers and using them for bulk surveillance databases for a long time.
A bit over a decade ago, I counted two to four such mandatory checkpoints on my commute depending on the route I took. So, somewhere in a government database, they have a log of when I went to and returned from work that year.
I’ve heard such databases go back decades and are widely used to blackmail politicians in the DC area. (Source, a rando that had had a few drinks claimed to work for the state dept. Even if they were full of it, the capability exists.)
However you may feel about the theft charge, if you find a tracker on your car, don't take it off. It's an occasion to call the police. Someone is either committing a crime by tracking you illegally or you're letting the police know you found their tracker. Maybe they'll remove it, as once the tracker is known to exist it's useless.
If you want to go the route of civil disobedience and take it off on moral grounds, you can do that too, but you'll probably go to jail. This isn't the first time I've heard of this, the FBI has charged people for tampering with the trackers they've put on people's cars.
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.
>> As an aside tracking cars is being done now for collections and repossession industry. Right now its done by scanning parking lots or places of high density and comparing to databases of records.
The DMV records are not supposed to be available to anyone but the police. The ability to abuse that for crime is huge.
There are experiments with this sort of system in my state in the US. In our case, the car owner signs up with a private firm that does the data collection and only reports the total distance driven to the government, not the actual locations.
I would assume that there is some law which requires the detailed data to be deleted, but I'm not sure about that.
Cars logging their location history and police getting that data: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/04/01/these...
Geofenced dragnets: https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/05/geofence-warrants-and-t...
reply