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Ars Technica Obtains Large Dataset of Oakland Police Department License Plate Scans

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 25 2015, @07:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the trust-no-one dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Ars Technica used a public records request to obtain a large dataset of license plate scans from 33 License Plate Readers (LPRs) in Oakland, California:

OAKLAND, Calif.—If you have driven in Oakland any time in the last few years, chances are good that the cops know where you’ve been, thanks to their 33 automated license plate readers (LPRs).

Now Ars knows too.

In response to a public records request, we obtained the entire LPR dataset of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), including more than 4.6 million reads of over 1.1 million unique plates between December 23, 2010 and May 31, 2014. The dataset is likely one of the largest ever publicly released in the United States—perhaps in the world.

After analyzing this data with a custom-built visualization tool, Ars can definitively demonstrate the data's revelatory potential. Anyone in possession of enough data can often—but not always—make educated guesses about a target’s home or workplace, particularly when someone’s movements are consistent (as with a regular commute).

It seems the cars of police officers, politicians, and others doing the spying should have been captured by the LPRs too. A prize for the first person to separate out what they've been up to...

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @02:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @02:23AM (#162592)

    > I'd put a transparent retroreflector

    You know that's a physical impossibility, right?

  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday March 26 2015, @03:35AM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 26 2015, @03:35AM (#162601)

    Here's an example of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNIFnbaIJqk&t=0m35s [youtube.com]

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    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @04:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @04:19AM (#162605)

      Come on!

      That material is semi-transparent because they drilled holes in it.
      The holes are not retro-reflective and the parts that are not holes are not transparent.
      The only reason that looks tolerably transparent is because there is a light source behind the retroreflector.
      Which, in case I have to spell it out, would not be possible for tape applied to a license plate.

      BTW, all US license plates are made of retroflective material to start with. Just like street signs.