Traffic cameras expose your location through parking apps(notmyplate.com) |
Traffic cameras expose your location through parking apps(notmyplate.com) |
But this way you don't have to pay for the cameras - someone else has done it for you.
“Several companies operate independent, non-law enforcement ALPR databases, contracting with drivers to put cameras on private vehicles to collect the information.”
https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...
Motherboard did a deeper dive on one of them:
“DRN is a private surveillance system crowdsourced by hundreds of repo men who have installed cameras that passively scan, capture, and upload the license plates of every car they drive by to DRN's database. DRN stretches coast to coast and is available to private individuals and companies focused on tracking and locating people or vehicles.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-wit...
At 10mph a car is moving at 176 inches per second, and to be able to read the plate with less than 1" of movement you need a camera that has a shutter speed of 176th of a second, or rounded up at 1/200th . To capture at 100mph a vehicle is moving at 1760 inches per second. To read the plate you'll need a camera that can capture at 1760th of a second, or rounded up to 1/2000.
I don't know of any android phones that can capture both at 1/2000th and video on a second camera at the same time to know when to fire the first camera.
look up the largest company in menlo park...
It has been that way with aircraft for a long time. Pilots, however, are such a minority that noone really cares.
Now that everyone is impacted, regulation might get updated (or someone might spend the time to identify existing regulation that prohibits this), and that would extend to other vehicles than those with wheels.
Interesting take.
If you have the "right" to $THING, but you have no redress if someone denies you $THING, you don't really have a right to it.
A cursory Google search comes up with some shady websites that sell similar tech, but it would be a nice DIY project to make a licence plate screen that can be changed on the fly (e-ink based maybe).
Has anyone tried it?
Only if you want to pass the toll / "télépéage" without having to stop for paying "manually" (using a credit card of whatever).
I've got one and now you can pass most tolls without stopping (but you need to slow down to about 30 km/h // 20 mph).
I then used a bunch of toll highways that were "electronic only" and received the appropriate charges on my credit card a few days later.
I think if you're going to set up a toll system in the future, then this is the tech you're going to use. Not RFID or transponders. Just read the license plate and charge the user.
There were options, BTW, to pay in cash, with pre-paid cards, etc, that didn't directly tie your identity to the plate. But I assume the rental agency will tie me to the plate, so used my credit card anyway.
In my experience any tolling system set up in the past decade is this way. No worries about transponders, they just have a bunch of cameras over the lanes and then send you a bill. Works even for out-of-state plates.
It's shocking to compare the privacy aspect of the app: instead of anonymously throwing some coins into a machine and putting a slip on your dashboard, the app needs: your phone number, your plate number, your credit card details and full GPS access. They're not hiding this: It's explained in their GDPR privacy notice that they track and store your phone location and travel routes even when you're not using a parking space.
On top of that, you also pay more for parking when using the app, since they take some percentage commission of the parking cost (apparently depending on your account options, but I never got far enough with the app to find this out)
What you're describing sounds illegal. Under the GDPR they cannot collect personal information that's not strictly required for the service the customer is requesting. Unless they have express permission and the customer isn't denied service for refusing.
No, I'm not joking. If we're not going to put serious legal restrictions and penalties on this kind of tracking, the only other viable option is to eliminate license plates entirely.
Here in Austin, there is at least one sane City Councilman who is pushing for a maximum 3 minute retention time for license plate scan event data. I expect that would get pushed to 30-180 minutes in reality, but there is no justification for any longer than that...
> A person commits an offense if the person with criminal negligence uses, purchases, possesses, manufactures, sells, offers to sell, or otherwise distributes a license plate flipper. An offense under this subsection is a Class C misdemeanor, except that the offense is a Class B misdemeanor if the person has previously been convicted of an offense under this subsection.
The digital plates thought of this in their design. You can think of them as frontend UIs for your jurisdiction’s motor vehicle authority, even though a private company is working on them. They will snitch when your tags lapse, both visually and electronically (that’s their purpose), and won’t let you do what you’re proposing if they’re designed correctly.
Anybody here ever worked with their local PD to get access to the ALPR data? Seems like the work to do it would be more political/bureaucratic than technical.
I came to the conclusion that the data is only available to defend the well connected, or to persecute their enemies (at least in the US).
I think the creation of mass tracking databases should be illegal.
Barring that, every single person should have equal access to it. (Perhaps gated behind filing a police report and swearing it is correct under penalty of perjury.)
Agreed on the dismal assessments, but those DBs are going to be created and we might as well extract some value as citizens.
Would you mind summarizing your attempt and any lessons learned (other than the disappointment mentioned)?
I’m thinking of a decentralized, Web3, IPFS-like distributed database, but instead of file storage, it’s real-time geolocation with OSM on the backend.
To protect privacy, I would support an understandable degradation of usability.
One could also set up an anonymous LLC and register the vehicle that way if they really cared.
Unless you’re an off-the-grid baby [0].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-have-an-unregistered-of...
The pearl clutching from some pilots (not accusing you of this) around aircraft tracking, ADSB, etc., seems exceptionally silly to me.
This might quickly change. Now people are somewhat routinely tracking millionaire's private jets and shaming them for what they perceive as inappropriate use. Given how the law correlates much more with the interests of the types of people owning private jets than with the interests of the average citizen, we might see attempts to get that outlawed.
Why does nobody care about those? Is it because they're a minority? Seems like you might be contradicting yourself?
There are so many people thinking "I did nothing wrong, who cares if I get tracked".... publish it all, and then have all the neighbours have access to that, the wife can see when you left the bar, your boss can see when you left, etc... only then will people be aware that it's not ok to do that.
There are also laws (not sure if accepted yet) that all cars should have remote shutdowns/blocks.. for "security reasons" (basically police can shut down your car if they want to)... and I'm just waiting for someone to hack the whole system and shut down all the cars around the world just for fun
It gives the possibility to infer patterns from your travels, or can, for instance, give a thief the opportunity to rob your place knowing that you are 200 km away and won't be home any time soon.
If really everyone would participate, I would give it a try. Would disrupt a lot, but might end up with a honest society. But in reality, if you have money, you can circumvent tracking, in varius ways.
I believe it is also being done with planes today? People flying planes they control, even if they do not directly own it, so can not so easily be tracked.
So no, it is not ok, as it further increases the power imbalance. But with self driving cars and more and more sensors and safety regulations, it will likely come anyway.
People are already complicit with keeping a device in their pocket that passively tracks their location.
Tracking people on camera and making them okay with it is the logical next chapter in this privacy erosion saga.
I'd have no problem with this as long as there was a flip side that said that I get a cryptographically secure feed of verified identities of everyone who accesses my data. Including if law enforcement accesses it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste... [1] https://www.marinetraffic.com/
I think the argument being made here is more that it's non-consensual data collection which seems solid. By owning a plane you're consenting to it being tracked and same for a car, but I don't think a person just using the plane/car/train/street should be allowed to be tracked - just the vehicle
As much as I hate the guy, Kissinger made a great point in an interview with Eric Schmidt paraphrased:
'We have lived a fairly peaceful period in the last century with a stable world order, we should not assume that this is guaranteed to continue forever.'
We usually don't like to think in centuries or decades. But a democratic state today can become autocratic 50 years from now.
Equally, today caring about my privacy is just adding a lot of friction to me daily live. 50 years from now, I have no guarantee that myself or someone in my family becomes 'a person of interest' for my government.
It can happen in years, nevermind decades.
Careful there. Now you're sounding like you you don't want to obey the government/laws if you don't agree with what is created in the future. At least this has been the argument around many gun laws that create registries, quasi-registries, or release identity information publically, especially with the Overton window and rhetoric.
Edit: why disagree? Really, still no response? Isn't this the general play that is being mentioned in the prior comment - information gathered now can be used against them by the government in the future when the laws change or are ignored? Is this only an issue when it's applied to some people or topics but not others?
Megacorporations aren't going to save you from this one. Actually creating regulation that will define where you're data is allowed to go (and stay) might.
1. The problem presented is not that parking apps exfiltrate data from your phone, it’s that anyone can throw your plate number into it and get notified of when you pass through specific areas.
2. Your solution would not address the problem. Problem is not one of data portability, but the fact that your license plate may be registered in a system without your consent or awareness. The convenience of the service is directly at odds with privacy/security, and the post is asserting that the gain in convenience achieved through the current implementation is not worth the perils of the unfettered tracking possible through it. It provides non-governmental solutions to ameliorate the issue.
This is how Apple comes into it.
Which means Apple has just about all the data about me over last ~3 years and so far they seem to be doing a good job of holding fort. Obviously if a state actor wants to screw me then well, all bets are off so I'm not going to guard myself against that as it's way too more inconvenient as you stated.
You put it on the plate so that it cannot be scanned but if police pulls you over it falls off.
“Officers are always looking for uninsured vehicles,” said Surrey RCMP spokesman Cpl. Scotty Schumann. “The officer was very surprised when he saw a valid B.C. license plate magically lift into place after they had passed the toll cameras.”
Even with paper tickets, if you paid with a credit card there's now a perfect record: Jim Smith got on at the Fruitvale station and got off in Fremont, stayed there two hours, and then came back the same way.
Also, it's a little doubtful colors can be recognized in all light conditions (at night, in a tunnel, etc.)
And if the car is simply parked (vs. a road check), does it matter that it's "flagged"? What could happen? There would have to be a warning somewhere for the car to be impounded, or to send officers to wait for the owner to show up. Very unlikely IMHO.
It's not a replacement for a vehicle, nor will it ever be.
My family uses our cargo bikes as our primary mode of transportation year round. It turns out that children were allowed to leave the house prior to the invention of cars and continue to be capable of wearing jackets in the winter. Many even like the snow.
The key thing to understand is that while sometimes you need more than a bike can carry, that's a small fraction of all of the vehicle trips Americans make. The average trip we take has 1.2 people in the car, is a relatively short (half of them are under 3 miles, a distance my son could do on his own as a 2 year old), and carries negligible cargo. Buying a vehicle for your 99th percentile needs is a significant expense for capacity you use only a handful of times a year — the average American spends $11k/year to own a car according to AAA, and for that much money you could buy and discard a new cargo bike every couple of months and still have plenty left over to rent a truck on the few occasions when you need landscaping or building supplies.
Cars also have situations they're a poor fit for: places without good parking, if you have to take part of your journey by another mode (bus, train, etc...) and need your vehicle on the other end, if you can't afford them (including fuel, insurance, etc), if there aren't good roads, if you're too young, etc.
The majority of my use of a vehicle was commuting to work. After that, it was shopping for groceries. I'm 2.5 years into having no vehicle. I'm 1.5 years into using a cargo bike. There are very few things that are not doable on my cargo bike as it is now. With a few DIY modifiations, I could narrow that even further. The remaining I can settle with ride shares from an app or even more old skool the use of friends.
edit - Found some for motorcycles on ebay...."Ideal for track days/shows/meets etc.." along with "FOR OFF ROAD USE ONLY" on the listings.
We were repeated victims of minor property crimes. The police spent maybe 5-10 officer hours investigating, which is more than I expected.
However, they failed to run a (unusual for them, but legal) database search that would have almost certainly identified the culprits.
I think they would have done it if the crime was higher priority for them, but ultimately, they need to prioritize their resources on serious crimes and things that make for good public relations / internal politics (like if we were friends with the mayor or something).
As the victims, we had every incentive to pursue the investigation, but no legal ability to do so.
I'm well aware that our experience was far, far better than is typical in, say SF or Oakland. In our case, they probably would have made an arrest if we had a positive identification of the criminal.
That's not really the case everywhere, which is a separate issue.
I believe that license plates used to be made of metal with reflective coating and ridges (made by prison labor?) but today on the street I am seeing what looks like white paper with black lettering?
Do you really want your health insurance company to know that you parked outside a doctor's office, who specializes in skin cancers? You just went for a check-up, but they might want to increase your payments or even cancel your coverage entirely.
Then good luck finding another insurance provider, since they all have that information now.
Or how about all future potential employers knowing that you once visited a union office?
There are so many cases, where people "who have nothing to hide" can't imagine where this could bite them in the future.
You (or your wife/daughter/girlfriend/secretary, etc.) visit a Planned Parenthood? Everyone - including your pastor - now has that info.
You go to a job interview at a competitor? Your boss now knows that.
We have no idea who or what groups who might want to snoop in where we park our cars.
The possibilities for abuse are endless. And as always, we have no way of predicting what use-cases unethical individuals will come up with as these things roll out.
This isn't something you get to just temporality "try". Once it's a thing, it will always be a thing. No way is the government letting that one slip through their fingers.
Also, I'm envisioning a world where people are getting their retinas altered minority report style to avoid this.
Family member of mine actually got in trouble because the dealership typed the wrong color into the registration paperwork. The color on the registration didn't match the actual color of the car therefore it was considered illegally registered and the car was impounded during a routine traffic stop.
The best way to increase privacy in the Apple ecosystem is to not use iCloud at all. Most of it (including your photos and backups, which contain endpoint keys and chat history) is effectively unencrypted and Apple can read all of it at any time without your device. Apple intentionally preserves this encryption backdoor in iMessage/Photos/iCloud for the US federal government, who can then access this information without a search warrant or probable cause.
This means creating a burner phone number, using that to create a burner Apple ID that is used only for installing apps, using only free apps (because the moment you put your payment card information in, you're deanonymized) and only using devices bought for cash.
Then Apple has a fair amount of information about you, but it's not linked to your identity.
Apple turns over customer data to the US federal authorities without a warrant over 30,000 times per year per their own transparency report. This is in addition to the normal legal process stuff that involves subpoenas or probable cause-based search warrants.
Citizen surveillance and corruption was the reason I started disliking cameras on public places.
As it stands today, the only privacy that you have today in a vehicle is the amount of money it takes to get information from someone who runs a tow truck.
The police are mum, as the ever present LPR makes it trivial to track anyone. My buddy owns a local pizza place and has a bunch of cameras with LPR. He routinely provides data to the local PD. There’s no rule about it - he can give that info to me.
You can be sure that this information is collected and aggregated by many commercial entities and used to correlate where shoppers shop, where fleet cars go, etc.
Beyond individual camera data, there’s already huge amount of behavioral data you can legally buy (usually from tracking apps the users either willingly chose to use as such, or didn’t fully understand it what it would do) and probably associate with other databases to get individual profiles.
Even full on data breaches associated with complete identifying data have had very little impact on the control we have on them. The companies leaking millions of records didn’t get much more than a stern look and a slap on the wrist from regulators around the globe, and the EU is the only entity starting to take it seriously at this point.
Life is a lot safer now, so ever more 'safe' things start to look dangerous. If you prefer liberty/privacy to safety you're quickly becoming a dinosaur and if necessary society will imprison you to make sure you don't interfere with democratic process of the majority.
Most cameras point down the length of the road and the "speed" that the camera sees is only a fraction of that. You can record a video with a merely-ok phone and probably see most plate numbers assuming the lighting isn't terrible. Good luck getting a phone camera to work at night with an LED flash though
(oh and also, this assumes you want to catch people speeding, to capture every plate number you would just put the camera near a slow area like a bend or stop sign)
But there are other approaches too - like putting a 99 cent novelty zoom lens on the front of your camera to capture more light for your region of interest, allowing you to use shorter exposure times. Or an infrared strobe light that flashes once per frame (most numberplates are retroreflective, so IR strobes work really well).
We just need to use more bicycles.
More people live in cities than rural areas, but it doesn’t mean they’ll come to take away your car.
1. Ride your bike into a train
2. Wait 20 minutes
3. Roll out of the train and ride into your destination
See, it isn't that hard. What part of this process requires you to be tracked? You don't need any ID to purchase train tickets.
The Netherlands would like a word ;)
Most people here have a public transport pass in their own name, linked to their bank account.
I'm perfectly fine with city dwellers having more bikes (if they so choose), whatever helps the traffic and parking in the cities.
My point still stands that in no way is a bike a replacement for all the utilities of a vehicle, whether you're offloading that by renting, borrowing, etc.
I'll drive my vehicle, you can ride your bike. The power of choice! No conflict needed.
Source? People get cars because they need one. The first big thing you get for yourself is a car, because it's so useful.
I believe the opposite of your statement is true, biking is only really practical in a very limited bubble.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...
There are many disabilities which don't allow driving, not to mention that in countries like the United States which don't take care of people there are many disabled people who cannot afford to own a car.
Accessibility doesn't have a single solution but if you look at areas which are welcoming to bicyclists they are also much better for a wide variety of disabilities because they have things like sidewalks, safe vehicle speeds or limited vehicle access, curb cuts, etc. You'll see people in electric wheelchairs or tricycles using bike lanes/paths, blind/deaf people don't have to worry as much about getting hit by a speeding car they were unable to notice, etc.
If you don't like bicycling, think of them as safe mobility lanes — the users certainly do, and we should all back having more of them because if we're lucky we'll live long enough to need them.
Not to mention asthma never prevented anyone from cycling. Maybe you won't win the Tour, but you can definitely commute cycling with asthma if your city is designed around humans and not cars.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpla/article/PIIS2542-5...
Don't recumbent electric trikes largely address this issue? Someone unable to operate one of those isn't very likely to be able to operate other types of (larger and faster) vehicles.
However, we saw in just the past year the consequences of even a moderate increase in the cost of gas for the average American, how they reacted to it, and how they learned from it. From that, I think I can say with fair certainty that the American brand of city will not cope well with any meaningful shortage. There are other, longer term problems that will begin to show themselves as abundance wanes as well.
A car can only ever be as useful as the roads it drives on, and the same with a cargo bike. If there are copious protected bike lanes that go everywhere you want to go, you would bike everywhere in just the same way you drive everywhere today. The only difference between them is how they deal with black swan events that threaten the abundance that drives driving.
I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but most places can't (and likely none should) build expecting that they're always going to have the resources to sustain excess. This isn't a knock against you either, you don't always have a choice as to where you live and the means available to you to get around. However, it is worth being aware of the narrowness of this perspective.
So many systems are legacy and entirely unused, or best effort - ie. if the camera is working, it'll be used, but nobody will be sent to repair it if it's broken.
Surveillance is easy now. But not yet $50 easy.
There's also the "anonymous" transport card that you can get for 7,50 and then pre-charge with a set amount. It will act as a pre-paid card rather than a debit card, so you can't board unless there's a sufficient amount stored on the card. But since most people then use a debit card to transfer money to their public transport card, it's not really anonymous anyway.
So most residents here choose the personal variant.
That's easy to say in Denmark, since the weather is virtually always pretty OK. It basically never gets below -10 or above +35. Without looking at the data I would guess 300ish days a year are between 5 and 25.
Florida - max temp 100F/38C
Have fun biking in Florida, unless there is a shower ready for you at each end.
Florida is also an interesting example given that it's both the southernmost point of the continental United States and at significant risk of catastrophic damages from the climate change caused in no small part by driving cars. Whether or not you prefer the status quo, continuing it isn't an option.
What about needing to go multiple places during the day? Should I now shower 4 times because I have 4 stops that require me to interface with people and appear clean?
Biking in Florida (substitute most of the southern US) for 7-8 months of the year is simply not possible unless it is acceptable to be a sweaty mess at each destination.
oooh, now do Texas. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Southern California
or, flip it. Do any of the states bordering Canada during winter.
Build the infrastructure and people ride bikes.
[1]: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
Of course I'm exaggerating. But at the same time gov is not known for being efficient + effective.
I suspect a lot of that $50,000 a year would get burned getting a single camera installed.
We mutually agree the roads - but it's unlikely I'll disagree unless you want to place four cameras per country worldwide to maximize logistics difficulties.
Half upfront, half when the service has been operating 3 months. Full refund if SLA not met. If you can show you're very solvent, you can pay in arrears instead.
I see software doesn't seem to be incuded.
Also, your numbers sound like you like to bid for government contracts.
For some reason I guess the business plan was about forgetting to get the permits...
Or even better to save all that faff, root a phone, run the drivers plate OCR software using the phones camera, stick to a gantry and send results via text message. You wouldn't even need live updates, pull the latest data at midnight each day.
Text is cheap.
Weatherproofing the camera and solar panels, getting permission to get them installed, actually installing them (working at heights over busy roads) and then maintaining them would be pretty expensive. You might also have to pay rent to whoever owns gantries, and what about locations where there aren't any existing gantries?
What about insurance in case you camera falls off the gantry onto a car and kills someone?
Edit: What about roads that don't have network coverage (not that uncommon in the Scottish Highlands)
I would likely order some chinaphone motherboards only - for example[1] - without the screen+case+accessories you save ~50% on the retail price. They're then not valuable enough to be worth stealing either.
If it's a small road with no bridges, tie to a lamp post instead.
You need to be able to install 3 per hour to make the finances work out - 10 mins driving, and 10 mins installing, and repeat.
If the city catches you, it's only a littering penalty. They likely wouldn't care.
[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003892325502.html
Breakeven is 1 year average residency - that has to include failure, end-of-life, theft, and removal by the city.
With more engineering effort, you can probably dramatically reduce power usage, for example by discarding parts of the frame that cars never drive through, which should allow extending the hardwares lifespan as batteries age and solar panels get covered in dust.
Satellite. you can buy text bundles. Sure the kit would cost a little bit more, but nothing major.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/court-ruling-homless...
By great business I mean it seems like something people would say for. I don’t know if it would actually be valuable data to billboard owners though. But I can imagine a mega unicorn startup advertising IRL advertisement analytics and back-selling the data to tons of data brokers.
There’s no right to hang up privately owned cameras in public.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/13/148506762...