But this way you don't have to pay for the cameras - someone else has done it for you.
“Several companies operate independent, non-law enforcement ALPR databases, contracting with drivers to put cameras on private vehicles to collect the information.”
https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...
Motherboard did a deeper dive on one of them:
“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.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-wit...
At 10mph a car is moving at 176 inches per second, and to be able to read the plate with less than 1" of movement you need a camera that has a shutter speed of 176th of a second, or rounded up at 1/200th . To capture at 100mph a vehicle is moving at 1760 inches per second. To read the plate you'll need a camera that can capture at 1760th of a second, or rounded up to 1/2000.
I don't know of any android phones that can capture both at 1/2000th and video on a second camera at the same time to know when to fire the first camera.
look up the largest company in menlo park...
It has been that way with aircraft for a long time. Pilots, however, are such a minority that noone really cares.
Now that everyone is impacted, regulation might get updated (or someone might spend the time to identify existing regulation that prohibits this), and that would extend to other vehicles than those with wheels.
The pearl clutching from some pilots (not accusing you of this) around aircraft tracking, ADSB, etc., seems exceptionally silly to me.
This might quickly change. Now people are somewhat routinely tracking millionaire's private jets and shaming them for what they perceive as inappropriate use. Given how the law correlates much more with the interests of the types of people owning private jets than with the interests of the average citizen, we might see attempts to get that outlawed.
Why does nobody care about those? Is it because they're a minority? Seems like you might be contradicting yourself?
There are so many people thinking "I did nothing wrong, who cares if I get tracked".... publish it all, and then have all the neighbours have access to that, the wife can see when you left the bar, your boss can see when you left, etc... only then will people be aware that it's not ok to do that.
There are also laws (not sure if accepted yet) that all cars should have remote shutdowns/blocks.. for "security reasons" (basically police can shut down your car if they want to)... and I'm just waiting for someone to hack the whole system and shut down all the cars around the world just for fun
It gives the possibility to infer patterns from your travels, or can, for instance, give a thief the opportunity to rob your place knowing that you are 200 km away and won't be home any time soon.
If really everyone would participate, I would give it a try. Would disrupt a lot, but might end up with a honest society. But in reality, if you have money, you can circumvent tracking, in varius ways.
I believe it is also being done with planes today? People flying planes they control, even if they do not directly own it, so can not so easily be tracked.
So no, it is not ok, as it further increases the power imbalance. But with self driving cars and more and more sensors and safety regulations, it will likely come anyway.
People are already complicit with keeping a device in their pocket that passively tracks their location.
Tracking people on camera and making them okay with it is the logical next chapter in this privacy erosion saga.
I'd have no problem with this as long as there was a flip side that said that I get a cryptographically secure feed of verified identities of everyone who accesses my data. Including if law enforcement accesses it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste... [1] https://www.marinetraffic.com/
I think the argument being made here is more that it's non-consensual data collection which seems solid. By owning a plane you're consenting to it being tracked and same for a car, but I don't think a person just using the plane/car/train/street should be allowed to be tracked - just the vehicle
Interesting take.
If you have the "right" to $THING, but you have no redress if someone denies you $THING, you don't really have a right to it.
As much as I hate the guy, Kissinger made a great point in an interview with Eric Schmidt paraphrased:
'We have lived a fairly peaceful period in the last century with a stable world order, we should not assume that this is guaranteed to continue forever.'
We usually don't like to think in centuries or decades. But a democratic state today can become autocratic 50 years from now.
Equally, today caring about my privacy is just adding a lot of friction to me daily live. 50 years from now, I have no guarantee that myself or someone in my family becomes 'a person of interest' for my government.
It can happen in years, nevermind decades.
Careful there. Now you're sounding like you you don't want to obey the government/laws if you don't agree with what is created in the future. At least this has been the argument around many gun laws that create registries, quasi-registries, or release identity information publically, especially with the Overton window and rhetoric.
Edit: why disagree? Really, still no response? Isn't this the general play that is being mentioned in the prior comment - information gathered now can be used against them by the government in the future when the laws change or are ignored? Is this only an issue when it's applied to some people or topics but not others?
Megacorporations aren't going to save you from this one. Actually creating regulation that will define where you're data is allowed to go (and stay) might.
1. The problem presented is not that parking apps exfiltrate data from your phone, it’s that anyone can throw your plate number into it and get notified of when you pass through specific areas.
2. Your solution would not address the problem. Problem is not one of data portability, but the fact that your license plate may be registered in a system without your consent or awareness. The convenience of the service is directly at odds with privacy/security, and the post is asserting that the gain in convenience achieved through the current implementation is not worth the perils of the unfettered tracking possible through it. It provides non-governmental solutions to ameliorate the issue.
This is how Apple comes into it.
Which means Apple has just about all the data about me over last ~3 years and so far they seem to be doing a good job of holding fort. Obviously if a state actor wants to screw me then well, all bets are off so I'm not going to guard myself against that as it's way too more inconvenient as you stated.
A cursory Google search comes up with some shady websites that sell similar tech, but it would be a nice DIY project to make a licence plate screen that can be changed on the fly (e-ink based maybe).
Has anyone tried it?
You put it on the plate so that it cannot be scanned but if police pulls you over it falls off.
“Officers are always looking for uninsured vehicles,” said Surrey RCMP spokesman Cpl. Scotty Schumann. “The officer was very surprised when he saw a valid B.C. license plate magically lift into place after they had passed the toll cameras.”
Even with paper tickets, if you paid with a credit card there's now a perfect record: Jim Smith got on at the Fruitvale station and got off in Fremont, stayed there two hours, and then came back the same way.
Also, it's a little doubtful colors can be recognized in all light conditions (at night, in a tunnel, etc.)
And if the car is simply parked (vs. a road check), does it matter that it's "flagged"? What could happen? There would have to be a warning somewhere for the car to be impounded, or to send officers to wait for the owner to show up. Very unlikely IMHO.
It's not a replacement for a vehicle, nor will it ever be.
My family uses our cargo bikes as our primary mode of transportation year round. It turns out that children were allowed to leave the house prior to the invention of cars and continue to be capable of wearing jackets in the winter. Many even like the snow.
The key thing to understand is that while sometimes you need more than a bike can carry, that's a small fraction of all of the vehicle trips Americans make. The average trip we take has 1.2 people in the car, is a relatively short (half of them are under 3 miles, a distance my son could do on his own as a 2 year old), and carries negligible cargo. Buying a vehicle for your 99th percentile needs is a significant expense for capacity you use only a handful of times a year — the average American spends $11k/year to own a car according to AAA, and for that much money you could buy and discard a new cargo bike every couple of months and still have plenty left over to rent a truck on the few occasions when you need landscaping or building supplies.
Cars also have situations they're a poor fit for: places without good parking, if you have to take part of your journey by another mode (bus, train, etc...) and need your vehicle on the other end, if you can't afford them (including fuel, insurance, etc), if there aren't good roads, if you're too young, etc.
The majority of my use of a vehicle was commuting to work. After that, it was shopping for groceries. I'm 2.5 years into having no vehicle. I'm 1.5 years into using a cargo bike. There are very few things that are not doable on my cargo bike as it is now. With a few DIY modifiations, I could narrow that even further. The remaining I can settle with ride shares from an app or even more old skool the use of friends.
Only if you want to pass the toll / "télépéage" without having to stop for paying "manually" (using a credit card of whatever).
I've got one and now you can pass most tolls without stopping (but you need to slow down to about 30 km/h // 20 mph).
I then used a bunch of toll highways that were "electronic only" and received the appropriate charges on my credit card a few days later.
I think if you're going to set up a toll system in the future, then this is the tech you're going to use. Not RFID or transponders. Just read the license plate and charge the user.
There were options, BTW, to pay in cash, with pre-paid cards, etc, that didn't directly tie your identity to the plate. But I assume the rental agency will tie me to the plate, so used my credit card anyway.
In my experience any tolling system set up in the past decade is this way. No worries about transponders, they just have a bunch of cameras over the lanes and then send you a bill. Works even for out-of-state plates.
It's shocking to compare the privacy aspect of the app: instead of anonymously throwing some coins into a machine and putting a slip on your dashboard, the app needs: your phone number, your plate number, your credit card details and full GPS access. They're not hiding this: It's explained in their GDPR privacy notice that they track and store your phone location and travel routes even when you're not using a parking space.
On top of that, you also pay more for parking when using the app, since they take some percentage commission of the parking cost (apparently depending on your account options, but I never got far enough with the app to find this out)
What you're describing sounds illegal. Under the GDPR they cannot collect personal information that's not strictly required for the service the customer is requesting. Unless they have express permission and the customer isn't denied service for refusing.
No, I'm not joking. If we're not going to put serious legal restrictions and penalties on this kind of tracking, the only other viable option is to eliminate license plates entirely.
Here in Austin, there is at least one sane City Councilman who is pushing for a maximum 3 minute retention time for license plate scan event data. I expect that would get pushed to 30-180 minutes in reality, but there is no justification for any longer than that...
> A person commits an offense if the person with criminal negligence uses, purchases, possesses, manufactures, sells, offers to sell, or otherwise distributes a license plate flipper. An offense under this subsection is a Class C misdemeanor, except that the offense is a Class B misdemeanor if the person has previously been convicted of an offense under this subsection.
The digital plates thought of this in their design. You can think of them as frontend UIs for your jurisdiction’s motor vehicle authority, even though a private company is working on them. They will snitch when your tags lapse, both visually and electronically (that’s their purpose), and won’t let you do what you’re proposing if they’re designed correctly.
Anybody here ever worked with their local PD to get access to the ALPR data? Seems like the work to do it would be more political/bureaucratic than technical.
I came to the conclusion that the data is only available to defend the well connected, or to persecute their enemies (at least in the US).
I think the creation of mass tracking databases should be illegal.
Barring that, every single person should have equal access to it. (Perhaps gated behind filing a police report and swearing it is correct under penalty of perjury.)
Agreed on the dismal assessments, but those DBs are going to be created and we might as well extract some value as citizens.
Would you mind summarizing your attempt and any lessons learned (other than the disappointment mentioned)?
I’m thinking of a decentralized, Web3, IPFS-like distributed database, but instead of file storage, it’s real-time geolocation with OSM on the backend.
One could also set up an anonymous LLC and register the vehicle that way if they really cared.
Unless you’re an off-the-grid baby [0].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-have-an-unregistered-of...
