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Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

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Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#71

Post by notahacker »

sp332 wrote: post #24
corresation wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

audited access and look-ups Driver's license photos have audited lookups, but all that tells us is that the system is routinely abused and no one is stopping it. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/ Putting every car into the database will generate the maximum number of conflicts of interest possible. If a database only has interesting or suspicious plates in it, an average cop might not brows…

The flip side is I'd rather be found by idle browsers in a database of everyone than a database of people considered (sometimes arbitrarily) as suspicious. Ultimately the thoroughness of auditing lookups and clarity about what is and isn't acceptable enquiry is more important than who is in the database and how many months of data is accessible.

Rogue cops might be able to misuse access to the system out of sheer curiosity but similarly rogue employees in certain positions at [mobile] telephone companies can abuse their position to tracking your whereabouts and call history, and financial organizations have access to your transaction history and card numbers - both far more sensitive than a few isolated datapoints from when your car passes police vehicles with their cameras switched on. I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#72

Post by tptacek »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #56
kvb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you read the actual paper, or just Tyler Cowen's blurb? The paper is based on actual data, not just suppositions. It too might be wrong, but the arguments it makes are more compelling than anything in your comment.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#73

Post by tptacek »

jerf wrote: post #42
igouy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distractions -- >>The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe... "I hoped that the national 55-mile per-hour speed limit--already in force--would help reduce gasoline consumption" http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8017 >>When conditions make 55 unsafe, people need to slow down enough to be safe... "California has a 'Basic Speed Law.' This law means that you may never drive faster than is safe for curren…

"I hoped that the national 55-mile per-hour speed limit--already in force--would help reduce gasoline consumption" That's clearly not the current reason. And more than just California has a law like that. I know Michigan does, I imagine most states do. It does show that somebody at some point understood the purpose. By no means am I saying all laws or bad, or that laws are bad, or even in a way that any particular la…

Higher-speed drivers use more fuel and produce more pollution. That's not a controversial argument. Whether or not it's the "current" reason for the 60-75mph speed limits we have now doesn't seem relevant. The question is, "should we raise the speed limit". If raising it increases the speed at which people drive, then raising it will increase pollution, and thus morbidity.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#74

Post by tptacek »

schiffern wrote: post #57
orangethirty wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You write that like it's crazy. But the data shows that when people drive faster on average, accidents increase.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#75

Post by notahacker »

GhotiFish wrote: post #46
danjones wrote: post #44

The issue isn't license plate readers, it's data retention. They certainly have a valid point about the need for limits on data retention however I feel they're going too far in demanding "public disclosure of the actual license plate data [(a week’s worth)]" just to highlight the issue. For reference on how this is handled in other countries take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti…

Gooooood point. Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with. I really wish they had just used that bloody system to look for hits on wanted and stolen vehicles. That's fine, everyone's ok with that. Mass collection and tracking of every single car that gets recorded? Why did they have to torpedo such a useful technology by…

Releasing that data publicly could be dangerous. Which kind of goes to show that the police shouldn't have that kind of data to begin with.

That's the point the EFF is trying to make, but it's also absurd. It would obviously be dangerous for them to release their donors' credit card details in public (or even store them in a non-encrypted database and non-PCI compliant manner), but that's an argument for limiting who has access to how much of the records and not an argument that credit cards and financial transactions data shouldn't exist.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#76

Post by belorn »

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…

I downvoted you because you imply that government collecting and recording data about their citizens is the same as citizen collecting and recording data about their government. You don't support such implication with anything, and just states it as an fact.

It is false. Actions made by Government, and actions made by private people has different effects on society.

A transparent government is a good thing. it allows for accountability and protects the individual. Its the only defense against power abuse.

A lack of privacy for the individual is a bad thing. It destroy modern society, breaks the court system, and encourage politics to focus on conservative efforts against political threats. Suddenly, one can identify any future political leaders before they has risen to a point of power.

If a popular smarthpone allowed people to identify any movement of an other person, FSF would likely not cheer on. Such app would be used to steal identify, provide stalkers with location data, allowed thieves to know where house owners are, and so on.

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#77

Post by orangethirty »

tptacek wrote: post #74
schiffern wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You write that like it's crazy. But the data shows that when people drive faster on average, accidents increase.

All I'm stating is that the double dime speed limit was enforced as a measure to reduce fuel consumption. Read this: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-signs-natio...

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#78

Post by timthorn »

UVB-76 wrote: post #47
tomkarlo wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

Average speed cameras are actually quite scary. In the UK they have only been used (as far as I'm aware) to enforce temporary speed limit reductions, most typically during roadworks, then removed once the speed limit is returned to normal. In theory they could be deployed across the motorway network with ease, and overnight force people to abide by the maximum speed limits (which a majority of people do not currently…

No, they're deployed as regular speed cameras too. The M25 cameras are linked to a variable speed limit system to dynamically manage traffic flow; not sure if that fits in your definition of temporary (the cameras are permanent but the threshold speed changes) but there are also many instances of fixed speed cameras both on the trunk road network (eg the A14 near Cambridge) and even in villages (eg in Nottinghamshire)

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#79

Post by steve_b »

notahacker wrote: post #71
sp332 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

audited access and look-ups Driver's license photos have audited lookups, but all that tells us is that the system is routinely abused and no one is stopping it. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/cop-database-abuse/ Putting every car into the database will generate the maximum number of conflicts of interest possible. If a database only has interesting or suspicious plates in it, an average cop might not brows…

The flip side is I'd rather be found by idle browsers in a database of everyone than a database of people considered (sometimes arbitrarily) as suspicious. Ultimately the thoroughness of auditing lookups and clarity about what is and isn't acceptable enquiry is more important than who is in the database and how many months of data is accessible. Rogue cops might be able to misuse access to the system out of sheer cur…

I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.

The EFF is concerned about privacy matters involving mobile devices. https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile

Re: Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy

#80

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tptacek wrote: post #72
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you read the actual paper, or just Tyler Cowen's blurb? The paper is based on actual data, not just suppositions. It too might be wrong, but the arguments it makes are more compelling than anything in your comment.

The "actual data" is just as problematic, because they took it from the speed limit increases in 1987 and 1996. Fast forward two or three decades and we have much safer cars, which will completely change the injury data. Meanwhile modern cars are significantly more efficient and have far better pollution control systems. On page 4 of the paper Benthem writes, "Perhaps surprisingly, the costs from pollution-induced adverse health impacts are about as large as the costs from traffic fatalities." (Which is astounding considering the number of traffic fatalities.) But now we have gasoline powered cars that produce exhaust which is cleaner than the ambient air taken into the engine in certain cities. We have fully electric cars. If your concern is pollution then you would do better with legislative efforts to get older cars off the road and eliminating their pollution entirely rather than only reducing it, which would also save you from unnecessarily slowing down newer vehicles that cause little to no impact on air quality.
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