The battle for privacy is already lost. David Brin's approach is what is remaining. THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY.
> The battle for privacy is already lost. Over my dead body it is.
Posting from the grave?
Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#52But 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…
>Reactions that involve essentially trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist or can be suppressed will never and have never worked.
It's not a matter of availability of technology, but essentially of values - for example, a technology for murdering people cheaply and effectively (guns) exists and yet murder is not ubiquitous precisely because people agree that it's wrong. The privacy folks are just arguing that being under near-constant surveilance when in public space is also wrong. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with them, but saying that if technology exists, then its use cannot be (to a large degree) prevented, is just incorrect.
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#53Does a license plate, legally speaking, have to be visible when the car is parked? If not, then covering it would be a stop-gap against cops driving through a parking lot and collecting the info on who is in that area.
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#54We need CAPTCHA-style license plates :)
I actually started doing some experimenting with IR LEDs since they emit light outside the visible spectrum, but do show up on cameras (as long as the cameras don't have an IR filter). The LEDs just weren't powerful enough.
There is this http://www.nophoto.com/
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#55But 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…
You are wrong about this part:
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 society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive for no gain. When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe, regardless of what the local speed limit is.
The 55 MPH speed limit was enforced by congress to reduce the consumption of fuel (gasoline). It has nothing to do with safety.
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
I don't think the data on optimal speeds is that clear cut. See another Marginal Revolution post for a summary of a study indicating that raising the limits generally would have costs outweighing the benefits: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/sho... .
The conclusions are based on the idea that higher speeds create external costs to third parties which aren't required to be internalized by the driver, making the driver more likely to choose a higher speed than would otherwise be optimal.
Which means the conclusion is wrong. The solution is not to have a lower speed limit, it's to require the internalization of externalized costs: Impose a fuel tax that accounts for the full cost of the pollution created to society. Require drivers whose speed has caused a collision to pay higher insurance premiums. Then drivers will have to weigh the cost to others in their decisions and the identified problem goes away.
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You are wrong about this part: 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 society, even moreso than for the individual. If everybody is driving at 65 in the 55 zone, but everybody is safe, the higher purpose of the law is being met, and citations for speeding are just punitive fo…
>The 55 MPH speed limit was enforced by congress to reduce the consumption of fuel (gasoline). It has nothing to do with safety.
The second sentence doesn't follow from the first. I guarantee there were congress-critters for whom the safety justification tipped their vote.
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#58But 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…
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.
Seems like a system that's destined to be rife with false positives. I can only see this data being misused by lawyers and law enforcement to support a bad assumption. Anyone with a basic familiarity with statistics knows misinterpreting is remarkably easy to do; misrepresenting it is even easier. I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case.
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#59Earlier 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…
> Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles.
Nope, they track people, too. According to the article, "just four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time)" can uniquely identify an individual person 95% of the time. When you live in a place where cars are the only practical way of getting around (like the LA area), then this is de facto person tracking.
Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
#60But 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…
As far as I can tell from the article, EFF is asking for transparency into how ALPR records are used in the LA law enforcement. The only policy response even mentioned - and it's not even explicitly called for - is for the legislature to set retention limits. Both of those strike me as eminently reasonable requests, and neither of which claims a general "freedom not to have your license plate OCR'd."
I don't agree with retention limits.
Data is awesome. Tt is history and science. In 50 or 5000 years anthropologists will be salvilating over having the data we record today.
Maybe in 5 years hobbyist, startup or evil corporation will come up with novel use that beneficial.
The problem is not in the data or in the technology. It is with how it is used. It should be available to everyone free of restriction.