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posted by martyb on Tuesday May 09 2017, @08:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the big-brother's-private-sector-sibling? dept.

If the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a San Diego-based Republican state senator have their way, it will soon become legal for Californians to cover their license plates while parked as a way to thwart automated license plate readers.

Those devices, now commonly in use by law enforcement nationwide, can capture license plate numbers at a very high rate of speed, as well as record the GPS location, date, and time that a particular plate is seen. Those plates are then run against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted cars, and a cop is then alerted to the presence of any vehicle with a match on that list.

As written, the new senate bill would allow for law enforcement to manually lift a cover, or flap, as a way to manually inspect a plate number. The idea is not only to prevent dragnet license plate data collection by law enforcement, but also by private companies. A California company, Vigilant Solutions, is believed to have the largest private ALPR database in America, with billions of records.

Do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public?


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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:50PM (9 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:50PM (#506899) Homepage

    Cop walks down road.

    Sees a car with a covered number plate.

    Suspicions raised, now have reasonable cause to investigate - and find every section of bald tire, faulty light, whatever other violation they can pin that they wouldn't normally bother with.

    Though I'm sure it will stop AUTOMATED picking up of your vehicle, I imagine it will attract a lot more UNAUTOMATED attention. Especially if you forget to make it visible again before you drive down the road.

    And, let's be honest. There's nothing stopping you being scanned getting to or from wherever you parked it from. As such, you don't even need to join the dots, whether that was your home or a car park.

    The future is not police cars with cameras, that's old hat already and police cars in the UK have ANPR written on the side of a ton of them and will automatically pick up out-of-tax, or declared-offroad, or no-test vehicles. That's been around for 20+ years, to my knowledge (I remember seeing it on one of those old police shows back when I was younger, including a Fred Flintstone "Yahoo!" every time the police car picked up a plate that shouldn't be on the road.

    The future is just a camera on every junction, capturing every part of your journey. Which is already a reality on most major roads anyway. Automatic average speed detection, invalid car detection, journey and usage monitoring ("So you say you've ONLY JUST TODAY driven uninsured?"), etc. from a static cam on every major road.

    A lot easier to manage than a fleet of fast-moving vehicles picking you up from moving footage and trying to talk home at high data rates to correlate with the databases.

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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:53PM (6 children)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @02:53PM (#506929)

    The future is just a camera on every junction, capturing every part of your journey. Which is already a reality on most major roads anyway. Automatic average speed detection, invalid car detection, journey and usage monitoring ("So you say you've ONLY JUST TODAY driven uninsured?"), etc. from a static cam on every major road.

    I take it you're a Brit? Americans aren't used to getting anal probed every other pace in public.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:30PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:30PM (#506993)

      Really? The major cities that I've been in on the east coast of the US are covered in cameras. Not to the extent of London, but still highly tracked. There are also EZ-pass readers set up for traffic monitoring purposes in addition to tolls.

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:17PM (3 children)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:17PM (#507014)

        A lot of the population in the U.S. doesn't live on the coasts.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday May 09 2017, @09:20PM (2 children)

          A third of the population in the U.S. doesn't live on the coasts.

          There. FTFY.

          Which means two thirds [theusaonline.com] do live on the coasts, with a plurality (38%) on the East coast.

          --
          No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
          • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:16PM (1 child)

            by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:16PM (#507158)

            You don't consider a third of 320 million people to be "a lot"?

            --
            "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
            • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:29PM

              You don't consider a third of 320 million people to be "a lot"?

              I certainly do. That is a lot of people. I was merely being specific.

              Given that GP mentioned the ubiquity of cameras/tracking on the east coast, I was just pointing out that more people live on the coasts (and more on the East coast than not on the coasts) than not. Which has implications WRT privacy and surveillance for a plurality of the US.

              --
              No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday May 10 2017, @01:18AM

      by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Wednesday May 10 2017, @01:18AM (#507228)

      The TSA violates the right of countless people every day in airports, the NSA conducts mass surveillance on the populace, we have DUI checkpoints where the police stop everyone, and so on. I guess those might be different things than what you're talking about, but they're not really any better.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:42PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:42PM (#506999) Journal

    Another possibility is to print a lot of real size stickers with random license plate identifiers to essentially mess up the license plate scanners. Or just plaster your own a little bit everywhere.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @06:54PM (#507048)

    > Cop walks down road.

    In most of USA this is a false premise...