
Patterns on goods designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers - vanderburgt
https://adversarialfashion.com/
======
exabrial
A week ago I was sitting at work and a civilian car drove by the office window
with a plate reader system and went up and down every row of cars in our
parking lot.

The car was obviously trespassing, you can't be on the property unless you're
a tenant or guest. But due to the spongy ethics of tech companies, I'm sure my
license plate is uploaded to some database and people know exactly where I
work and what time I'm away from my house.

~~~
acdha
Does your office or property management company hire someone to do parking
enforcement or security? It would not surprise me to learn that they’re
subcontracting the task of identifying cars which aren’t on a list somewhere.

~~~
exabrial
Definitely not. This is a pretty cheap rental.

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vmh1928
With a digital license plate it should be possible to display a random number
or no number while in those locations(work or mall parking lots, your
driveway, etc.,) where there is no legal requirement to show the plate number.
Alternatively the digital plate could be configured to flash the plate number
at an interval longer than the typical plate reader vehicle takes to pass your
parked vehicle. That would at least cut down on the capture rate of government
and auto loan companies that cruise parking lots which is a good portion of
all scanning activity. Unless the digital plate is reporting it's location via
cell network.

~~~
gorbypark
I was just thinking the other day that we need to have e-ink based license
plates. The plate number could be generated and changed every n minutes. There
would have to be a government run system that would be able to link the
generated number to the owner of the car, but hopefully there'd be some
checks, balances and logging on the use of it (ie: a warrant would be
required, etc). It wouldn't prevent a government from abusing it, but at least
private companies scanning activities would be rendered null.

~~~
nitrogen
Interesting, something like TOTP for license plates.

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Tomminn
Ha:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15606675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15606675)
(2017)

~~~
soulofmischief
Check out Dazzle, it might interest you.

[https://cvdazzle.com/](https://cvdazzle.com/)

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taneq
Another similar project: [https://cvdazzle.com/](https://cvdazzle.com/)

~~~
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye
That site claims that OpenCV is a facial detection algorithm...

~~~
dymk
It’s simply claiming that it implements one...

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JoeAltmaier
Always been a dicey business. I'd worked on one back in the 80's(!) and the
issue then was, bumper stickers that had the same aspect ration as a license
plate. Plus license plate frames (which must by law not cover any part of the
plate with info on them, but often do anyway).

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bredren
Someone tested this shirt out on EasyALPR Parking Enforcer a recently and it
did scan. (I’m putting EasyALPR through Startup School right now)

I was wondering about it—-though it was only tested against the image of the
shirt, I suspect it would be picked up at close enough range.

Most of my work is creating great workflow for handling incorrect or unwanted
data gathered using alpr on iOS.

If you were waltzing through a the parking lot of one of my commercial
property customers and a patroller somehow scanned you—-some admin later that
day might frown for a few moments before marking the “vehicle sighting”
invalid.

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fnord77
was thinking about some sort of product line of eyewear or mask that would
mess with facial recognition.

wonder if people would purchase it if it wasn't too obnoxious.

~~~
lolc
It's called "sunglasses".

~~~
i_am_proteus
Typical sunglasses do not hide your face from facial recognition!

~~~
DennisP
These do: [https://www.reflectacles.com/](https://www.reflectacles.com/)

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u35517
These t-shirts will look nice when they make versions addressing Automated
Face Readers.

~~~
LoSboccacc
i dont have a link to the paper but there's patterns already on sale
[https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.310496356.4049/gptr%2Cx900%2...](https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.310496356.4049/gptr%2Cx900%2Cfront%2Cblack-c%2C200%2C205%2C210%2C230-bg%2Cf8f8f8.lite-1u2.jpg)

~~~
XaspR8d
That particular pattern looks like it came out of the Hyperface project.[1]

Also here's an actual purchaseable link at RedBubble [2]. No affiliation with
the seller (nor does it look like they're connected to the original project).

[1] [https://ahprojects.com/hyperface/](https://ahprojects.com/hyperface/)

[2]
[https://www.redbubble.com/people/naamiko/works/24714049-anti...](https://www.redbubble.com/people/naamiko/works/24714049-anti-
surveillance-clothing?p=mens-graphic-t-shirt&ref=available_products_swiper)

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davedx
Echoes of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition book.

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glloydell
If you're gonna put a target on your back, this seems like a solid way to go
about it.

~~~
lixtra
If we think like this, we are either paranoid or already live in a
totalitarian society.

~~~
rootusrootus
There are plenty of paranoid people. We have a ways to go before we reach
authoritarian.

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chiph
Get a shirt with Washington DC license plate 800 002 (Presidential limo)

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exabrial
I need an lcd bumper sticker that displays these randomly very quickly.

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dwighttk
how does this help unless the license plates are valid? And multiple people
have your plate on their shirt and are walking in front of readers all across
the country?

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IshKebab
Yeah I doubt it, unless they're retroreflective and you're in the habit or
running down roads.

~~~
gattilorenz
Well in plain sunlight it should work OK.

The problem is the plate numbers are limited, you are not injecting random
data, just repetitive data.

~~~
shoo
If you got two different shirts displaying two different plates, you could
flip a coin each morning to decide which one to wear before starting your
daily jog down the freeway.

Guaranteed randomly sampled data

~~~
Xylakant
I think the parent wanted to point out that it’s fairly trivial to blacklist
the plates on these shirts and thus remove the injected data. The number of
available plates on the shirts is limited, likely they’re not valid plates
either.

~~~
harimau777
It would likely be more expensive, but it seems plausible that it would be
possible to manufacture shirts that each have a random license plate number.
That would at least make it so that they would have to make the blacklisting
local to the area where a given shirt owner regularly travels.

~~~
marcus_holmes
individually would be prohibitive, but specifying a different set of plates on
each order from the supplier shouldn't be too hard. The printing is done
digitally anyway, as long as the cuts don't change it should be trivial to
specify a new pattern.

disclaimer: I have very little idea about the details, I've just advised
startups that got clothing manufactured offshore.

