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Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

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Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#31

Post by betterunix »

mikeash wrote: post #23
corresation wrote: post #7

But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recordi…

It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public. I wonder what people would make of it if someone released a highly popular smartphone app that did this same sort of thing, just crowdsourced rather than done by dedicated police. You could build a gigantic, publicly-accessible, searchable…

"It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public."

The police have great power over the general public; we must keep that power in check, and one of the ways to do that in the modern world is to record police abuses and police brutality and publish those recordings on the Internet. I would rather see people who are dissatisfied with law enforcement aim cameras at the police than to have guns aimed at the police. We generally do not want our cities to become war zones.

On the other hand, when the police record the general public, the balance of power is further tipped toward the police. They already have paramilitary teams, armored vehicles, even attack helicopters, and they have vast surveillance powers; it is hard enough to prevent such an organization from become an oppressive, tyrannical force. Further expansion of police power is unnecessary and dangerous.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#32

Post by betterunix »

mikeash wrote: post #30
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to understand how it's hypocritical to advocate recording of the people sanctioned by the state to use lethal force while decrying a system that is by all measures ripe for abuse.

Because recording police is justified by "we're both in public, and I should be able to record public things", which justification applies equally well to police using cameras in public.

That is kind of like saying, "Everyone has freedom of speech, therefore the government should be allowed to publish propaganda."

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#33

Post by sambeau »

mikeash wrote: post #23
corresation wrote: post #7

But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recordi…

It does seem terribly hypocritical to complain about the police capturing images from a public street, while simultaneously defending people's right to record the police in public. I wonder what people would make of it if someone released a highly popular smartphone app that did this same sort of thing, just crowdsourced rather than done by dedicated police. You could build a gigantic, publicly-accessible, searchable…

You are a private citizen. A police officer is not while in the process of carrying out their duty. This is, in part, why they wear a uniform and why the are badged and numbered.

The police have a very special and privileged place in our society. They apply the law which means that they individually (and as a group) are given special rights by society for our protection. However, they are in a unique (and uniquely easy) position to abuse those extra rights.

How can we fight corruption if the people who's job it is to fight corruption are corrupt? How can we prove that they aren't? The extra powers the police are given make it very easy for them to be corrupt and to hide the fact.

Complaints against the police force are rarely about them recording their work, it is about them recording private citizen't going about their business for no good reason. Legitimate protestors legitimately protesting.

The police complain that they shouldn't have to be recorded going about their business as no-one else puts up with that. But they are wrong. They apply the law, the final step in the chain — and that isn't recorded. Everything said in parliament is recorded, everything said in court is recorded.

Hell, even truck drivers have tacographs!

Should police cars have dash-cams in this day and age? Yes. Should police have google-glass-like recorders recording what they see and what they do? Yes probably. Should a police gun record everything it shoots? definitely.

And the same applies for prisons and prison officers.

These are exactly the people who society has a valid, just reason to record in their duty.

A good cop has nothing to fear from more cameras. Even better—automating the process should, if done correctly, mean the death of a ton of paperwork.

The other argument for the police recording themselves is the fact that recording equipment is now so prevalent on walls and in the hands of the citizenry that they would surely need their own evidence to back up what the cops say. How many jury's will continue to take the word of a cop over two conflicting video recordings? Imagine how persuasive video footage of a cop being punched in the goggles would be? Surely the cops need that?

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#34

Post by betterunix »

corresation wrote: post #18
sp332 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentionally building a database whose sold purpose is to track tens of millions of mostly-innocent people as they go about their business for years on end is a bad idea.

Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated. Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end. And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is…

"I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement."

In other words, you feel that these people do not have enough power over the public, and should be given more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Bernardino_police_swa...

"Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances"

It will almost certainly not, except under the most far-right definition of "appropriate."

"with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves"

Have you ever tried to file a FOIA request? The public will have a substantially harder time accessing that information than the government will.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#35

Post by tomkarlo »

jerf wrote: post #17
corresation wrote: post #7

But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recordi…

The "real" solution is to retrain society from top to bottom to break the conflation between what a law is and the outcome a law is intended to produce . As that phrasing implies, I don't think this is going to be an easy process. The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe , and particularly to make driving safe for socie…

The solution isn't "lossy" enforcement, at least in the case of speed limits. It's to revise the speed limit to a higher, more realistic figure and then enforce that limit as rigorously as practical. This is what the UK and other countries are doing with average speed cameras.

It's been shown that in some cases US speed limits make roads less safe and are lower than the speed limits recommended by the engineers who designed the roadway.

"The design speed for the project was 110 km/h (68 mph). The design speed is like a warranty: nothing in the road design requires a driver to go slower than 68 mph, not even on a wet road at night (the design conditions).

The average speed is not far from the design speed. The 85th percentile speed, which is supposed to be used for setting speed limits, is around 75 mph. A little over by my measurement, which found 1% compliance with the speed limit."

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/be-...

Having speed limits where a large percentage of drivers regularly violate them teaches people to break the law casually. (Similarly, COPPA basically teaches kids to lie about their age online.)

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#36

Post by betterunix »

draugadrotten wrote: post #3

The battle for privacy is already lost. David Brin's approach is what is remaining. THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY.

People still need privacy. Businesses need to keep their strategies, market research, trade secrets, etc. secret to remain competitive. The police need to keep secret the identities of undercover agents, planned evidence gathering, etc. In many places, homosexuals must keep their relationships and desires secret, or else become social outcasts (or worse).

For all the talk about how privacy is dead, the reality is that normal adults have secrets and would be very angry if those secrets were revealed.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#37

Post by pfortuny »

betterunix wrote: post #32
mikeash wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because recording police is justified by "we're both in public, and I should be able to record public things", which justification applies equally well to police using cameras in public.

That is kind of like saying, "Everyone has freedom of speech, therefore the government should be allowed to publish propaganda."

Nope: the government is not a 'person' in that sense because it has a special role in society, which has been given by society and needs to be controled by society.

The government is not 'one' in 'everyone'.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#40

Post by copperthrowaway »

This is just a throwaway account.

I actually work on a system like this, including creating and training specialty neural networks for a state I will not name. Although it sounds like California's DB is a lot more sophisticated in the amount of data it captures and the amount of data mining that they plan to happen, it's hard to imagine that more states aren't doing things like we're doing. My department works directly with law enforcement as basically an R&D arm of state/local police. The extent of our work on this particular domain is mostly limited to running automated NCIC checks on the licenses (reveals warrants and stolen cars) - not really tracking total location and piecing together where this car has been in the past (though that probably could be gleaned with a few well-defined db queries).

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