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.
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.”
Personally, it’s all the other plate readers I care about too. I’m more a privacy nut than trying to evade police detection.
I’d imagine, as with so much, cops just outsource it to a data broker type service. They feed the camera footage to a third party API that spits back matched data. Either plate info or human info. My data doesn’t need to go into so many tracking DBs.
No way so many small agencies can do anything themselves.
In the US, at least, your license plate can get scanned by cameras driving around and you show up on security cameras (with improving facial recognition).
What's a domain analogous to computers without tracking? I suppose all those are "by computers" at the end of the day, but I can't think of anything I do that isn't tracked somehow.
Surprised this isn't already a thing in production. Police cars have had automatic license plate detection coupled to databases of known stolen cars etc. for many years. Likewise cars have had pedestrian detection cameras for a few years.
All the technical bits are there, and I can't imagine it would be a difficult issue legislation/privacy-wise.
I think the US already has big private networks of number plate recognition cameras that sell feeds to cops, bounty hunters, advertisers, and traffic alert companies. It wouldn't be much of a hop.
Do you drive a car? License plate readers and associated location tracking software are becoming increasingly commonplace. Are you also "helping to create" "the surveillance state"?
Presumably because of the title, people are making this a thread about license plates. But Flock (a YC company!) does a whole bunch of ML image classification stuff; think of it as something closer to a Google search for cars that have traversed your municipality in the last week, searchable not just by plate but by make, model, and distinguishing characteristics; you can even track cars by bumper sticker.
We went through this exercise last year in Oak Park, with our local PD requesting 20+ cameras --- a tactical misstep, because they'd been piloting a small number of cameras, and the larger request drove their acquisition costs across the threshold of needing board approval, which they were surprised to discover was contentious.
Because the board was split on the prospect of giving OPPD a Village-wide "Google for all movements of any car everywhere" capability, we were able to extract concessions. We got board approval for a much-reduced deployment (I think we have 8 cameras), contingent on recommendations from our citizen police oversight and IT commissions (I'm on one of those).
In the end, we got a General Order issued from OPPD limiting the use of cameras to violent crime, all uses traceable to case numbers reviewable by our police oversight commission, no usage from personal machines by OPPD staff but rather only OPPD-issued equipment, mandatory 2FA, and some other things I forget.
We were much less successful at regulating data sharing. This is a huge feature of Flock, and part of its viral customer acquisition strategy. OPPD found out about Flock by getting access to data from neighboring municipalities; many police departments run "transparency portals" to show you who they're sharing with, and it's often "every law enforcement agency in the region". Which makes sense, if you look at it from the perspective of the police department! But it makes it much harder to regulate how cameras are used, because our PD can't issue General Orders for other PDs, and Flock doesn't appear to provide any tools to enforce limits on data sharing.
The obvious thing to ask for in a pilot deployment is "turn all the sharing off", but that's hard when Flock's foot in the door was sharing from some other department.
I'd have been happier if we'd ended up with zero Flock cameras, but I'm not sure how political realistic that would have been, and I'm surprised we were able to extract as many concessions as we did.
Probably the most important thing we got was a commitment to a review of the effectiveness of the cameras after a year; presumably, if OPPD can't tie the cameras to solving specific violent crimes, we'll stop paying for the cameras.
The Village Board didn't enjoy being blindsided by a random acquisition request, and demanded a process be put in place for future surveillance tech requests. So one happy side effect of this is that we teed up ACLU CCOPS†, which I expect to see passed in the next couple months. CCOPS theoretically prevents municipal agencies from deploying surveillance tech without board approval, even if the cost is below purchasing thresholds.
Get involved in this stuff. You'd be surprised how little engagement there is at the local level, which is where a lot of the most important governing decisions are made.
One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this.
For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit toll booths, go under over passes, and parked at a service station. About 25 hits that my account had access to (probably hundreds or thousands that I didn't have rights to see).
I think you quoted me and posted in the wrong place.
What about a system that had no data retention but could actively scan and compare to a list of plates that had warrants, Amber Alerts or BOLO's. Surveillance is only going to get easier with tech. Rules of use is what is important.
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.
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.
Rather than worry about this little tracking peculiarity, my mind wanders to a future where the govt is smart/capable/evil enough to be connecting all the cameras in buildings, cars, etc. into one place that constantly monitors for license plates and is able to tell:
-- anyone who has been driving around with a car registered in another state but hasn't relocated it to that state within a month (avoiding taxes -- CA I'm looking at you)
-- backtracking where someone who committed a crime came from, and has gone
The biggest collections of plate-scan data are private. It started with repo-men who pay to be part of nationwide networks where they all drive around scanning every visible plate in exchange for getting hits on plates they are looking for.
But, as always, those enormous databases were too tempting to just sit on and the maintainers have started looking for other ways to monetize them - if they'll sell joe lawyer a search for $10, you can be sure they are selling access to the NSA, et al too.
tl;dr - Homeland Security is taking bids for software that will gather license plate surveillance data, parse it and consolidate it into a searchable database where they can track the movement of vehicles anywhere in the country.
The good news: What? They don't already do this?
The bad news: Phone call metadata is small time stuff. What Big Brother really wants is to know where you've been, anytime, anywhere.
The vast majority of those laws seem to be targeted at law enforcement. I imagine any system designed to automatically collect license plates would be included, whether it's sync or async.
[1]https://www.flocksafety.com/
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/02/27/flock...
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