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A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

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Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#171

Post by greedo »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #105
Spooky23 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could get to that just via chokepoints. Examples: The RFK/Triboro bridge in NYC gets 60M crossings annually. I95 at the North/Carolina border gets 14M cars a year. State DOTs publish this information for all interstate and many other highways, so it’s easy to piece see where the flows are. Additionally, DMVs sell all sorts of information, and auto repair and dealerships sell whatever DMV does not. It’s definitely…

holy crap. what kind of info are the DMVs selling? who are the buyers?

They sell to companies offering warranty extensions. They know exactly when you bought the car, so they extrapolate the best time to harass you about anything service related with your car.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#172

Post by GVIrish »

User23 wrote: post #106
GVIrish wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me one instance in the US judicial system where children are forcibly taken from parents and shipped off to detention centers in other states when the parent has been charged with a misdemeanor. Bottom line is that it is. Not. Done. And it clearly is appropriate to 'think of the children' when cruelty is being purposefully inflicted on children as official government policy. There's no rational defense for that…

Actually it's done to US citizens routinely. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/us/family-separation-amer... . And before you quibble, recall that jail is for misdemeanors. Again, your reasoning faculty has been overwhelmed by effective rhetoric. Take a deep breath, step back, and start using your left hemisphere.

You failed to read and/or comprehend what I said. Show me an example where children are forcibly separated and shipped to detention centers in different states when a parent is charged with a misdemeanor.

I already pointed out that children are only taken away in cases of neglect or abuse.

But if you must continue patting yourself on the back for how 'rational' you are while you can't provide any rational basis for your arguments, knock yourself out.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#173

Post by pubutil »

jefurii wrote: post #170
walrus01 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is anyone in SV going to eat if private corporations can't track our every move? I work for an ISP and we do not track our customers. At all. We bill them and they receive a reliable service that performs as advertised. Maybe we could go back to the oldschool model of actually selling a product or service, delivering it to the customer, and keeping the customer happy?

Which ISP is this? (interested)

I’m not walrus01 but I know of a few ISPs in the Bay Area that put an emphasis on net neutrality and users’ privacy, on top of running a good service: Wave on the SF/Daly City side, and Sonic’s running fiber in the East Bay. Both have impressed me, especially Sonic which provides their own VPN and runs a public wiki that rivals my company’s internal IT wiki. I’ve also heard good things about LMI but I have no personal experience with them.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#174

Post by jsjohnst »

reaperducer wrote: post #107
Spooky23 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot. I imagine that would require much better cameras and cost more. On my car the tamper prevention measures make it hard to read from many angles as well. I think the solution for the use case you describe is coming in 2020, where cars will be able to talk to each other and to road sensors. That technology will probably be used to collect mileage taxes and demand pricing as cars shift to electric, so identity…

No need to wait until 2020. Your car is already being tacked by sensors that detect the unique ID's of the transponders in your tires (used to tell your car the tires' air pressure). And since most people don't change their tires very often, with enough sensors deployed in various locations (parking lots, drive-throughs, gas stations, etc...) it is very easy to develop patterns of movement and build a profile of an i…

I worked for a company doing this in 2015-2016. Bluetooth isn’t the primary mechanism because your phone doesn’t passively transmit its Bluetooth Mac under normal circumstances. It’s primarily Wi-Fi that’s used for that (and no, the Wi-Fi anonymization work done by Apple and others wasn’t enough to block this). We did use beacons too for stores that had a store app (and thus could be setup to receive the beacon probes), but Wi-Fi was the primary triangulation method. We also fused data from stereoscopic vision cameras too to get a more accurate count (since some folks disable Wi-Fi or don’t have phones on them).

It’s a scary space, but that’s part of why I joined. The space needs more smart privacy focused engineers to make sure things are built respecting privacy (I rearchitected systems to where no one person could be tracked and only aggregate data existed).

I’d love to be utopian and say nothing like this should exist, but the reality is if we don’t build it, someone will, and likely do it poorly.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#175

Post by walrus01 »

jefurii wrote: post #170
walrus01 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is anyone in SV going to eat if private corporations can't track our every move? I work for an ISP and we do not track our customers. At all. We bill them and they receive a reliable service that performs as advertised. Maybe we could go back to the oldschool model of actually selling a product or service, delivering it to the customer, and keeping the customer happy?

Which ISP is this? (interested)

I'd rather not mix my sometimes controversial comments on HN with work - everything I write here is very much not in my "official" capacity... But I can say it's west coast, small to medium sized, clueful, and doesn't suck.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#176

Post by finnthehuman »

narrator wrote: post #64

I read articles like this and I think that one's opinion on this is directly correlated with whether one thinks that immigration laws should be enforced. I don't think most people are calling for immigration laws to be eliminated and anyone who manages to make it here should be allowed to stay indefinitely. What I don't get is the whole selective enforcement of laws thing. If someone somehow managed to get across the…

> one's opinion on this is directly correlated with whether one thinks that immigration laws should be enforced.

Oh, absolutely. If someone doesn’t like the surveillance state, this is just another datapoint on an ever-increasing list. Still disappointing, but not uniquely so.

The people so civically unengaged that they actively champion the increased surveillance of modern life right up to the point it’s used against their pet causes disgust me.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#177

Post by HillaryBriss »

Spooky23 wrote: post #121
HillaryBriss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

holy crap. what kind of info are the DMVs selling? who are the buyers?

Lots of data re vehicle registration and licenses to different groups. Insurance companies and banks are common but there are many others. Everyone from towing/repo people to Experian. New York has a good FAQ. https://dmv.ny.gov/dmv-records/permissible-uses-personal-inf... Some states are not so good at protecting data, or rely on an honor system: https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2013/02/11/cbs-11-investigates-your...

I like that Texas article particularly. The DMV has a db of 22 million car registrations, and they sold the trust of their citizenry for a couple million dollars.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#178

Post by HillaryBriss »

greedo wrote: post #171
HillaryBriss wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

holy crap. what kind of info are the DMVs selling? who are the buyers?

They sell to companies offering warranty extensions. They know exactly when you bought the car, so they extrapolate the best time to harass you about anything service related with your car.

That does explain some of the servicing offers we get from local car dealers.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#179

Post by finnthehuman »

megablast wrote: post #133
Skunkleton wrote: post #13

To me the issue here is that this data is collected in the first place. It seems wrong to me that private corporations are tracking my every move.

I don't see any difference between tracking cars and guns, except cars kill more people every year in the US.

Good point, we should do away with car registration. I’ve never lived in a state with a gun registry.

Re: A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

#180

Post by Spooky23 »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #178
greedo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sell to companies offering warranty extensions. They know exactly when you bought the car, so they extrapolate the best time to harass you about anything service related with your car.

That does explain some of the servicing offers we get from local car dealers.

That's Carfax. Most repair shops sell their records as well. The dealers know your mileage from JiffyLube/etc.

I've been told that if you self-maintain, you'll have a hard time getting a trade-in as dealers expect to get service history.

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