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Crime Privacy Government

A Threat to Privacy in the Expanded Use of License Plate-Scanning Cameras? (yahoo.com) 149

Long-time Slashdot reader BigVig209 shares a Chicago Tribune report "on how suburban police departments in the Chicago area use license plate cameras as a crime-fighting tool." Critics of the cameras note that only a tiny percentage of the billions of plates photographed lead to an arrest, and that the cameras generally haven't been shown to prevent crime. More importantly they say the devices are unregulated, track innocent people and can be misused to invade drivers' privacy. The controversy comes as suburban police departments continue to expand the use of the cameras to combat rising crime. Law enforcement officials say they are taking steps to safeguard the data. But privacy advocates say the state should pass a law to ensure against improper use of a nationwide surveillance system operated by private companies.

Across the Chicago area, one survey by the nonprofit watchdog group Muckrock found 88 cameras used by more than two dozen police agencies. In response to a surge in shootings, after much delay, state police are taking steps to add the cameras to area expressways. In the northwest suburbs, Vernon Hills and Niles are among several departments that have added license plate cameras recently. The city of Chicago has ordered more than 200 cameras for its squad cars. In Indiana, the city of Hammond has taken steps to record nearly every vehicle that comes into town.

Not all police like the devices. In the southwest suburbs, Darien and La Grange had issues in years past with the cameras making false readings, and some officers stopped using them...

Homeowner associations may also tie their cameras into the systems, which is what led to the arrest in Vernon Hills. One of the leading sellers of such cameras, Vigilant Solutions, a part of Chicago-based Motorola Solutions, has collected billions of license plate numbers in its National Vehicle Location Service. The database shares information from thousands of police agencies, and can be used to find cars across the country... Then there is the potential for abuse by police. One investigation found that officers nationwide misused agency databases hundreds of times, to check on ex-girlfriends, romantic rivals, or perceived enemies. To address those concerns, 16 states have passed laws restricting the use of the cameras.

The article cites an EFF survey which found 99.5% of scanned plates weren't under suspicion — "and that police shared their data with an average of 160 other agencies."

"Two big concerns the American Civil Liberties Union has always had about the cameras are that the information can be used to track the movements of the general population, and often is sold by operators to third parties like credit and insurance companies."
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A Threat to Privacy in the Expanded Use of License Plate-Scanning Cameras?

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  • Not at all (Score:2, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) *

    "More importantly they say the devices are unregulated, track innocent people"

    No, they track cars.
    To track people, there are millions of cameras on the outside of building, railway stations, trains, buses, taxis, Uber, ATMs and so on.

    • Re: Not at all (Score:5, Insightful)

      by getuid() ( 1305889 ) on Monday July 05, 2021 @07:42AM (#61552332)

      Yah, pretty much like scanning someone's ID at every corner is tracking the paper, not the person.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Every step is a significant change. There are millions of cameras but at the moment nobody has access to all of them, and where there is access most of them don't do licence plate reading or facial recognition, and those that do mostly don't report that data back to a central government database in real-time.

      This isn't a slippery slope fallacy, it's an understanding that corporations are gathering more surveillance data and (outside of GDPR countries) sharing/selling it, and there are clear and tangible ram

    • Being that nearly every country in the world requires cars to have a unique identifier prominently placed on the rear and often in the front with large clear to read text isn't something you do to protect people's privacy.
      They are there for the sole purpose of identification of the car and link it to it's owner.

      That said the problem is say I get a ticket for running a red light just from my plate where I get points on my license without proof that I was driving my car at the time. It could had been my wife

      • That said the problem is say I get a ticket for running a red light just from my plate where I get points on my license without proof that I was driving my car at the time. It could had been my wife or child, a friend or work aquance. So in order for me to avoid taking punishment I will need to turn in someone close to me.

        And that of course is the drawback to allowing someone else to use your car - you are now assuming (or sharing) liability for whatever that person does with it.

        If you loan someone your car

        • Doesn't this break the doctrine that spouses do not have to testify against each other?
          As that formal bond/contract is equivalent to Priest Confession booth and Dr privilege

          Seems like an obvious constitutional violation that in order to be not-guilty, the party must identify someone else. Office/Court, I think the president was driving my car, give him the ticket.

          "You don't have to turn someone else, just prove that it was not you. " That is still guilty until proven innocent. Officer/court, I am prohibit

      • You don't have to turn someone else, just prove that it was not you. In most of the cases, if not all, the driver is also on the photo of the infraction. Else, you can easily invalidate the fine due to lack of proof. At least, that's how it work in France (the only contry where I received a fine without being in the driver seat. I was able to show that I was not in the driver seat from the evidednce photo of the infraction) and should in any sane country.

        • You don't have to turn someone else, just prove that it was not you. In most of the cases, if not all, the driver is also on the photo of the infraction. Else, you can easily invalidate the fine due to lack of proof. At least, that's how it work in France (the only contry where I received a fine without being in the driver seat. I was able to show that I was not in the driver seat from the evidednce photo of the infraction) and should in any sane country.

          In the US, some jurisdictions did an end run by making it an administrative fee, thus no points and no going to court. You want to fight it, talk to the private company running the for profit red light camera. Some courts, IIRC, said, "Uh, can't do that" and a number of jurisdictions scrapped red light cameras for a variety of reasons.

    • Wasted resources?

      Mass facial recognition is generally stupid. It's resource intensive and generally meaningless.

      When I was working for "big telco", I regularly saw presentations of our latest tracking technology. In fact, it was REALLY accurate. We were able to watch live real-time data of the movement of billions of connected gsm, 3g, lte, 5g and NB-IOT devices with high precision. We sold the data to traffic planning organizations.

      The important thing to realize about these systems is that you don't actual
  • Chicago? That is a sick joke. Obviously scanning car plates doesn't help to fight crime in a significant way.
  • I, as a grey law abiding citizen with a boring life, do not care what they do with my number plate pictures.

    But I as one datapoint in a vast collection of similar datapoints over a significant span of time, which will have the heck datamined and A.I.-ed out of it, do care a lot about the taking of pictures.

    Unfortunately the H. sapiens mind works much slower than tech innovates, and most of us Joe Taxpayers are still somewhat stuck in the James Bond/Cold War-era paradigm of spying by having a human observe

  • ... a local municipality won't even enforce license plates at all right now (I mean, that you even have one). Because it discriminates or something.
    • ... a local municipality won't even enforce license plates at all right now (I mean, that you even have one). Because it discriminates or something.

      Out of curiosity... are you complaining or praising?

  • People who don't mind their own business.

    We effing need to stop being afraid of how technology *MIGHT* be used and just enact laws that actually punish people who *DO* end up using such technologies irresponsibly or in ways that endanger people's safety and security. And of course, follow through with enacting appropriate punishment in places that use those technologies when such abuse is discovered. One thing that might go a long way to making this possible is the adoption of strict policies regradin

    • ... just enact laws that actually punish people who *DO* end up using such technologies irresponsibly or in ways that endanger people's safety and security. And of course, follow through with enacting appropriate punishment in places that use those technologies when such abuse is discovered.

      ROFL!

      Yes it would be nice if tyrants and corrupt police would obey such laws, or consistently enforce them on each other. But they don't. In particular, they don't EXACTLY WHEN YOU WOULD NEED IT.

      "Who will watch the wat

      • by mark-t ( 151149 )
        I don't think you actually read everything that I wrote. I said that policies could be adopted which ensure accountability, and that usage of technologies such as this which might be abused could be audited by a third party.
        • I think he answered. Your accountability and audit will just not be done when it need to be done. For that matter, the third party could be as corrupt than the perpetrator or found dead due to falling from a high rise building by accident.

      • by mark-t ( 151149 )

        I have and I will always remain solidly opposed to any attempts to regulate usage of technology by *ANY* party to do something which humans can, in fact, already do. Human beings can remember shit. Should people with exceptional memories not be allowed to work in the police force or the government? What about in the future when chips might be implanted in the brain to perhaps treat memory disorders? What if such technologies can actually enhance memory beyond what is currently humanly feasible? Will p

    • If the data aren't collected, they can't be misused. Better to have a higher crime rate (even if people get murdered) than live in a piggie panopticon.
      • by mark-t ( 151149 )

        If the data isn't collected, then it can't be *USED*, period, even if that use might otherwise benefit society. Outlaw the misuse, and follow through with punishing people who misuse it.

        You know, kind of like what is done with other dangerous technologies, like guns or hell, even driving in the first place.

        • Our society is safe *enough* ... the road to Hell is paved with "for the benefit of society." "For society" and for "the cheeeldren" are the mating calls of the stinking coward.

          I consider "misuse" to be anything other than a violent crime investigation or a situation where a life is in danger. Not for establishing residency in tax cases, not for estabilishing infidelity in divorce cases, or any other such trifling crap.

  • What privacy? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 )

    Is there still anybody who thinks their movements outside their home are somehow "private"? Your every move is tracked, every day, and it's been this way for years.

    Nobody actually cares about YOU and where YOU are. What "they" care about is...Can we sell you something?

    From a crime perspective, tracking allows investigators to reconstruct the movements of people, after a crime has occurred. Perpetrators are discovered by filtering for those who were at the crime scene, and also at the gun shop where the weap

    • Perpetrators are discovered by filtering for those who were ... at the gun shop where the weapon was purchased

      Actually, registration records (let alone gun store videos) are almost NEVER used, or useful, for finding or convicting a perpetrator who uses a gun in a crime. That's just a song-and-dance that proto-tyrants use to justify collecting information that will someday be useful to disarm their potential opposition when they (or some successors or invaders) get around to their end-game.

      Criminals are (by

      • I didn't say anything about gun registration, you did. My example was just that, an example. It wasn't meant to include all possible scenarios.

        Here's a real example: The Austin Bomber in 2018 was tracked through a license plate caught on camera. https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/22... [cnn.com] This is exactly the type of research I was describing.

  • I think it might help if we take a moment to consider the functional value that license plate scanners have.

    If a crime is committed and a report from the crime scene includes a license plate, then law enforcement can run the plate through the database linked to cameras and in a pretty short order, they may be able to determine most recent movements of the vehicle. The theory goes that this would be a reasonable mechanism for catching a criminal or suspected criminal in the event that a motor vehicle is u
    • 2. Presumption of Innocence Like IMSI Capture devices [the so-called "stingrays" that capture and track cell-phone use] ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) technology simply cannot be set to filter out people not suspects of committing a crime. In other words, at the point of data collection, [and given that the stated purpose of the technology is to catch criminals] every motorists is being presumed guilty. We could debate whether this amounts to a Fourth Amendment infringement, but even if not, it definitely steps over the line of "presumption of innocence".

      A presumption of innocence in court, not when a cop watches you. In many ways, this is like a high tech stakeout, except the ramifications are much wider reaching.

      3. Limited Value This might be a weaker argument and it will pivot around any data we might have concerning the "average number of passengers in a vehicle involved in a crime"... in that we have to question the value of establishing that "Vehicle X" passed a camera in "Location Y" at "Time Z" in the broader context. Can that establish the driver? The passengers? No. So now the value derived from the knowledge of the whereabouts of a vehicle at a precise moment in time is eroded, unless the driver is also the suspect.

      One value is in looking for patterns. What cars were at x, y, and z at times of interest.

      One of the most interesting elements of this yet to be evaluated [because getting the data would be hard] would be to ask a random sample of Police Forces: "OK, can you provide us with comprehensive details of all the cases where the use of ANPR technology either directly solved a crime or directly contributed to the solving of a crime?" We'd have to set some explicit limits about what we mean by "directly contributed to the solving of a crime" - for example, using images to trace the route of a stolen vehicle and being able to extrapolate a likely destination and then retrieving the vehicle - but that should be possible.

      Looking at tag data and linking it to crimes is far older than ALPR. IIRC, a parking ticket led to the "Son of Sam."

      As with any technology, there are good and bad uses. The challenge is in how do you control it.

  • These cameras are in use her and are found to be pretty useful here, to catch people violating the speed limit (using 2 cameras on a stretch of road and working out the average speed), and to catch vehicles flagged by the police, the tax authorities, or customs. When they first introduced these cameras, privacy was already a concern, so one of the design parameters of these systems was: only licence plate numbers of cars in violation are allowed to be stored. The speeding cameras would discard the number
    • by ytene ( 4376651 )
      "Of course the usual argument against this system is: how can you be sure that they really don't store these license plate numbers. Well, you don't, not 100%."

      The agencies that purchase these cameras are either part of or funded by some form of government, whether that be federal, state or local [for example - in other countries it will be different]. So why not a simple Act of Congress to set up a "Federal Data Privacy Watchdog" that has as their sole purpose the job of making sure that Uncle Sam abides
  • Many of teh same people that think this is a good idea would not want it to be deployed against them. There is OSS license plate tracking tools available Automatic License Plate Recognition also OpenALPR. It can run on a RaspberryPi, so for very little money anyone with some skills can build their own database. Crowd sourcing a tag database would no doubt have politicians worried; but hey, if you're not doing anything wrong.
  • This is why I'm glad that "immunity passport" schemes have mostly failed in the US. The issue is that the immunity passport amounts to an electronic ID which is linked to name and DOB info, so any store using it (as well as the app provider itself) could generate a database with:

    1. Name
    2. DoB
    3. Entry time/date
    4. Location

    This would be a goldmine for law enforcement and attorneys involved in civil suits such as divorce cases ... "we have a record of you, Mr. Jones, checking into Ali Baba's Turkish Restau

  • I remember when these started becoming popular in the US. The intent of them was one thing - looking for stolen vehicles. That sure didn't last long though !

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