71–80 of 148 posts
That is the worst thing. Either allow everyone or no one. Giving more and more capability to special interests is how we have gotten into being a surveillance state and become very unbalanced authority / responsibility between different segments of society.
Terrifying startup prospect: Imagine a small dashcam-like consumer device that was able to perform the same type of license plate recognition coupled with GPS location. A data collection company could provide these devices for free or at a low cost to anyone, and then pay drivers for every license plate scan their box sends in. Obvious downfall: someone will figure out how to spoof a GPS signal and randomly generate…
You realize that's essentially what's already happening the article, right? Large databases companies like DRN are providing free or low cost ALPRs to repo men who submit a minimum number of records per month. I'm not sure consummerizing it makes it much more terrifying, given the tremendous size these databases have already achieved.
"ban most uses of license plate readers, ... making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll collection, and parking regulation." That is the worst thing. Either allow everyone or no one. Giving more and more capability to special interests is how we have gotten into being a surveillance state and become very unbalanced authority / responsibility between different segments of society.
Is this discussion any different than the one we had a couple decades ago when credit/debit cards went from occasional use to primary currency? There was huge outcry about how everyone would be tracked, how every purchase you made could be aggregated and monitored and tracked and sold and leveraged, how personal problems could arise when a spouse or lawyer saw inappropriate purchases on bank card records, etc etc. To…
> I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data. I've thought about this a lot (because my startup wants to move into this space in a year or so, depends on the progression of wearables like glass) and hav…
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The scan of the license plan is not really the issue, it's the collecting of the scan, tagging it with GPS, and aggregating the scan into large, permanent databases that can be accessed by both government and private corporations. If all you do is scan a plate and display "car payments past due", or discard the scan if the car is not wanted, it's not all that different from a human looking for a car. But these folks…
I don't see how quantity suddenly transforms a permitted thing into a forbidden one. If I don't need your permission to look at your car's licence plate on a public street and write down when and where I saw it, or simply take a photo of said licence plate (as photos currently include timestamp+location) - then the situation doesn't change in any way and I still don't need your permission even if I did the same for a…
"ban most uses of license plate readers, ... making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll collection, and parking regulation." That is the worst thing. Either allow everyone or no one. Giving more and more capability to special interests is how we have gotten into being a surveillance state and become very unbalanced authority / responsibility between different segments of society.
I'm curious - how exactly would one refute the following argument put forth by data brokers and repo agents? > But Digital Recognition and other so-called “data brokers” who collect plate scans are fighting Hecht’s bill, arguing that repo agents are not invading privacy when they scan a license plate, which is available for all to see. The data brokers do not disclose the owner of the plates, they point out, though…
Now see the issue?
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> Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems No, affairs can cause marital problems. Technology just makes it easier to get caught This is not a vindication of the technology in question, but it can't be blamed for everything. I can't help but think that cheating business travellers had it a lot easier before the advent of ubiquitous, near-free mobile long distance telephony made it easier for spouses to…
I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour. Lying to people is a bad idea; some people mistakenly believe that they can lie freely without others knowing, and then cry foul when new technologies threaten that belief. Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation; technology only allows us…
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When Google Glass first was announced, I imagined a future where it would become more common to rent out access to one's vision. I imagined a service, called BuyMyEyes, that would set up per-minute or per-user fees that sellers could use to offer access to their line of sight to interested viewers. Then there could be a chatbox where the viewers input what the "eyes" should go look at next. In such a world, I could i…
>I could imagine a system where police departments send a notification: "The person 50 feet in from of you is a potential person of interest in an investigation. Keep him in your line of sight for 10 minutes and win a free iPad!" I'd be surprised if it doesn't go like "The person 50 feet in from of you is a potential person of interest in an investigation. Keep him in your line of sight for 10 minutes or you'll be ar…
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For the EU, Data Protection Directive 95/46 (and the incoming changes from 2012), attempt to offer protection against automatic decisions. In that document there is the concept of consent and that the consent can only be for the purpose the data was collected for. So should some clever company sell widgets at a loss to collect data and should that data then have an extra purpose in aggregate that does not fall into a…
In the licence plate situation the point would be that this isn't personal data, and thus the data protection directive and the consent requirement doesn't apply. In the motorcycle example, there is no personal data involved whatsoever - it's just a photo that some motorcycle was there; again, DPD doesn't restrict anything at all for such cases.
So if a private company were to automate the collection of license plates and therefore have a trove of information that included times and places a car was and then that system was to grow so that insurance companies used that information so rates could be calculated through Bayesian classification using that data to determine risk, then that would be an automated decision based on that data AND THAT is protected (in theory) by that directive and the laws based on it in the member states.
That was the point of my comment. Automated decisions are protected unless you consent to them.