61–70 of 90 posts
If anybody is interested in playing with ALPR data, we put it up on github but removed the license plate numbers: https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data
Does 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.
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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.
Especially when the pattern is what the cops use to identify the suspect in the first place.
There is a real problem with big data in the courtroom. Take the intersection of a victim, a crime and a suspect and look at a million data points and you'll find several thousand that match. Put only those in front of a jury and you have something that looks like a mountain of evidence but is really just systematically applying confirmation bias to random noise.
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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…
The owner of the vehicle is identifiable through owner's documents and insurance and etc. The driver of the vehicle is identified either through a police office confirming ID, or by a camera taking a photograph of the driver, or people making sworn statements and risking jail time if they lie.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21737627)
She lied and said she was driving, so she took his penalty. They both got prison sentences for that lie.
> And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been
At the moment there's probably no need to care. Would you care if you were living in a little tin-pot country where kidnap was common and corruption was rife?
As you say there are plenty of uses for this data. How about some that inconvenience you? Demographics to target billboard ads along your route? Introduction of toll roads for traffic management?
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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.
Behold, the Legal Singularity.
Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.
We 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/
I was about to post the same thing. This is a technological problem, it could do with a technological solution: We need a way to make sure that license plates are not machine readable.
Or maybe this: Make them explicitly machine readable, but then have the vehicle alert the owner when something reads it. So instead of a license plate you have a radio transceiver with a range of a few hundred yards, which broadcasts the vehicle's make and model and allows anyone to request the VIN. You can request the VIN with a mobile device but every request gets logged and notifies the vehicle owner, and making a request would require probable cause by law.
Everyone in the U.S. will soon have a mobile device anyway (if only one without a data plan that was discarded by someone with more money and only used for wifi), so this actually serves the original purpose of a license plate better than existing license plates do, because you can read the VIN from a vehicle after witnessing a violation of the law even if it's at an angle that you couldn't have read the plate or is far enough away that you couldn't have made it out.
On the other hand, it prevents passive surveillance or surveillance without probable cause, which has always been a misfeature of license plates outside of their original purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Victims of domestic violence, to name the most obvious example, probably feel differently about making their location indexed and searchable for anyone to look up without restriction.
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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'.