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":
License plate scanners are pretty cool technology-wise. It's amazing machine vision has advanced that much. I was under the impression these were being used to search for specific license plates though. Like a stolen car or the car of a fugitive. I didn't realize they were storing every single license plate recorded into a giant database. That is more concerning.
This is a country where when they installed license plate scanners on highways they accompanied them with large screens that show the plate that was just scanned.
So as to... I don't know, brag that you're collecting all this information, that is to be inevitably leaked in a while? To make people feel safe, while clearly indicating the highway exits to avoid if you actually steal a car?
I always wondered on the legality of private license plate scanning. With just a bunch of people cooperating one could pretty much map out all the troop movement throughout the city.
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.
Previous poster wasn't talking about automatic scanning of all license plates, but about license plates themselves and (maybe) speed cameras and the like. These are two different things.
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.
I wish the article weren’t so light on details about the purchasing of license plate reader data. Does anyone know who is supplying this data? I suppose it’s possible that they went to every 7-11 in the country and asked them if they can buy a feed of their external cameras, but that seems haphazard at best. Is there some central clearinghouse where private security camera feeds are being aggregated? I can’t think of an upside for any business to participate in such a thing.
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.
The weird thing about license plate scanning is that basically anyone could do it, and there's no obvious way to stop it. Any group of ordinary citizens (including private businesses) could create a distributed network of license plate scanners by installing devices in their cars and around their houses/buildings.
It would be an interesting act of protest to track the movements of powerful people, so as to compel them to take privacy more seriously.
With all the talk of spying and monitoring citizens' whereabouts via license plate scans -- can anybody setup a camera to take snapshots of license plates of cars entering & leaving NSA & other such installations, and cross-reference these against license records?
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.
Edit: This article mentions "purpose-built camera cars":
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/screen-plate-club-how-l...
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