
Your car, tracked: the rapid rise of license plate readers - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/your-car-tracked-the-rapid-rise-of-license-plate-readers/
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brc
On a stretch of highway near where I live, they have installed 'average speed'
cameras. These are cameras roughly 20 miles apart, and they read your plate as
you drive through, then read it again when you leave. If your time between the
two cameras is too short, you get a speeding ticket in the mail.

The worst part about it is that, in order to make it effective, they closed
several highway exits so that people couldn't short-cut the system by taking
an exit before the second camera.

While I don't like excessive speeding, I think this is just revenue farming
rather than a public safety initiative, and all the assurances about the data
being safe just don't wash with me.

~~~
lutorm
How do they identify the driver?

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Wingman4l7
That's just it -- they can't. Better not let someone else drive your car; if
it's registered under your name, you're responsible for the fine!

 _EDIT: I stand corrected; apparently, this is not the case in AU, and may not
be the case in certain states in the US. That's the last time I don't fact-
check my posts... =P_

~~~
lutorm
How does that even nearly meet the "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" criterion?
I don't see how that could ever hold up in court.

~~~
viggity
in Iowa, the tickets they issue are civil citations, not criminal citations.
Therefore, you have no right to confront your accuser and there is a lower
criterion for guilt. Also, if you want to contest it to an administrative
judge, it'll cost you an EXTRA $80

~~~
Wingman4l7
This is the state saying "We value the court's time & resources over actual
justice."

Anecdata: A coworker once got ticketed for speeding on a highway on-ramp. Upon
trying to contest his fine in court using photos of the roads, he was told by
the judge that he would be fined an extra $[large sum] for every photo he
attempted to show to him.

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jack-r-abbit
It never ceases to amaze me how much privacy people expect to have when they
are out in public.

~~~
Zikes
I don't expect privacy, just a reasonable degree of anonymity.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Fair enough.

 _To prevent problems, only Cronin and Hutton can add plates to the hot list.
Each time a plate is run for historical data by either an officer or requested
by an outside agency, the requester has to inform the chief by e-mail.
Requests are tallied in an annual report for the town council._

The system parses license plates and matches them against a hot list. If a
match is made, then a human gets notified. Some database somewhere knows the
cars that have come and gone. But there is nothing to indicate that each
license plate that gets captured is matched up to a person. The screen shot
they have only shows the basic info captured from the camera. So unless your
plate is on the hot list or someone with the authority requests to pull
historical data about your plate number this does seem like a reasonable
degree of anonymity.

It would be nice if this was regulated a bit. Data should get purged in a
reasonable time frame. Solid auditing for data retrieval requests.

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NyxWulf
I knew it! Roughly a year ago I was driving home from work at night. My
registration was expired by a few days, and I drove past an officer in a
parking lot. As I was passing him, I knew my plate was expired, so I was
looking at his plate to see if I would be able to determine from that distance
if the plates were expired. So I was scrutinizing his plates to see how much
detail I could see. I have better than 20/20 eyesight, and I knew there was no
way I could see that level of detail at the distance he was at. So imagine my
surprise when he comes after me immediately and pulls me over.

More out of curiosity than anything I asked him how he knew my plate was
expired, his response was "I have really good eyes". I've thought back on that
experience over the last year, and I knew the technology for reading a license
plate wasn't hard, but I didn't know how widespread the use was. After reading
this piece and seeing the picture of those cameras, which are mounted in that
area, I'd bet they are using it to give expired registration tickets too.

~~~
mc32
Not sure how registration works where you are, in Calif (and other states) the
yearly registration sticker is color coded by year. So, while they may have
sought to read the "month" sticker, they might have just looked for the color
of the tag as an indicator.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
I want to say that each month also has a unique color. So the two color combo
can easily be translated to the month/year your tag expires. A friend of mine
drove for a long time using stickers he had peeled off of other cars. As long
as he kept is driving legal, he would pass the "color checks". However, once
he did something that gave a LEO cause to run his plate... clearly he was
busted for it. Kind of interesting when you think that these cameras would
have caught him straight away.

Another scenario, when people have paid for their registration but for one
reason or another have forgotten to place the sticker on their plate. Those
people would not get hit with these camera since their plate would not come
back as expired. They would still fail the "color check" which usually can be
explained to the LEO. If not, it is usually just a fix-it ticket.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Sounds like that state needs to implement anti-tamper stickers like you see in
retail stores. They're scored in several places, so if you try to unpeel them
once they've been stuck to something, they'll come off in pieces.

~~~
cagey
I use a razor blade to (a) remove all existing annual stickers from the plate
(makes it harder to remove the top sticker intact), and (b) cut an "X" in the
new sticker once I've applied it.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Is registration tag theft a problem where you live? That seems totally
incredulous to me.

~~~
cagey
I'm not aware whether it is or not. But once I saw how easy it was to remove a
sticker-stack intact using a razor blade, I adopted the habit. The effort
involved is minimal (I keep a single-edge razor blade in my toolbox for
utility reasons), so why not? Just another part of car maintenance, like
changing the oil & filter...

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andyfleming
It'll be interesting to see how this industry will adapt as cars become more
automated.

~~~
mc32
That's a good point. As cars become more automated and perhaps evolve into a
fleet of roving cars one "hires", or even the personal ones, I can see where a
driver or passenger has to be "authenticated" as they are let in. In addition,
the automobiles would be in constant communication about any state with a
central office.

Something to this effect would obviate the need for external cameras, as one
might assume this level of automation would allow for the autonomous vehicle
to know if it was able to drive/ambulate legally or not (i.e., I'm not in
compliance, do you wish to override, you can override 5 times before having to
take it into a shop to have it re-registered and validated and authorized to
carry people, etc.

~~~
Wingman4l7
As a passenger, why would you have to authenticate? You don't have to do this
for taxis. At the most, you'd just have to prove up-front you could pay,
and/or put a deposit down against damage to the interior.

If automated vehicles become common enough, the tracking issue might solve
itself, as you'd be making micro-payments to a service, traveling anonymously,
instead of owning your own vehicle.

~~~
mc32
I was thinking that in the scenario where there is a roving fleet of non-
chauffeured cars for hire, one would auth (or identify oneself) so that it was
known who to charge back in a non-repudiable way.

As a side-effect, it could be enhanced to check to see if the person did't
have any outstanding warrants, leans, etc. against them. The system could, if
allowed be programmed in such way, to take the person in, if it was
certain/verifiable the person was "wanted" by the authorities. It sounds very
dystopian, but it could happen, if the circumstances are right.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Again, why would you need to authenticate yourself? As an example, you usually
don't have to authenticate when you pay for something with a card -- you just
authenticate that the card is valid / has sufficient funds. That's why fraud
detection for cards exists -- because you can use a card without being the
owner. Also, there are prepaid cards, and cash (assuming that still exists).

As for your other idea, _Minority Report_ beat you to it -- when the
authorities find out that the protagonist they are pursuing is riding in a
certain taxi-car-pod, they lock it down and try to bring it in.

~~~
mc32
Auth to make it non-repudiable. Right now with peopled (staffed) services, one
can ask to check ID, if there is a level of suspicion, that's a type of
authentication, the way I see things. Since these cars would not have an
"agent" they'd, given circumstances and business model, may have a need to ID
people in a non-repudiable way.

I wasn't trying to beat a sci-fi scenario out. Just saying that this kind of
automation would make the scenario possible, given the right legal allowances.
It would be both useful (from a crime-fighting POV) and also very big-brother
controlling. So I guess it depends on the balance people might find
acceptable.

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ricardobeat
In a few months RFID chips will start to be installed in all vehicles in
Brazil, reaching 100% of the fleet in 2014. It seems like a much more reliable
way to track cars and will hopefully bring enhancements in traffic control.
The transit authorities also say it will "help fight vehicle theft" but I
can't imagine how, since a tag on the windscreen it's pretty easy to remove...

We've also had plate scanning in highway patrol checkpoints for many years,
they will probably be shut down in the next year or so. Any reason this is not
being considered in the US?

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beagle3
Think of a "crowd sourced" tracking system. Most people these days have phones
that are capable of taking pictures, OCRing, GPSing and uploading this data in
real time. It wouldn't be hard to build a system based on volunteers that maps
most cars most of the time. And with facial recognition, mapping people as
well.

And it's not even illegal.

Speaking of which -- anyone know a good open source ocr that can run
reasonably on a mobile phone?

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systematical
Ugh... shit like this makes me want to wear a tin foil hat, but then I realize
how much work that would be so I remain a lazy tracked american.

~~~
rhizome
That's a nonstarter. The NSA started putting back-doors into aluminum back
around the time of the Roswell Incident.

~~~
sliverstorm
Probably a remote shutdown exploit by now, too.

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Wingman4l7
The article mentions potentially using LPRs to catch illegal immigrants --
how? Wouldn't this fall under the umbrella of just catching unregistered
vehicles? You need a driver's license to register a car, and you need a birth
certificate to get a driver's license.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Pure FUD. If you click through to the CNN article, you'll see that the ICE has
asked companies to help them figure out a way to do it. It is largely based on
the idea that they will compile a list of license plates that can be
associated with "at-large, convicted criminal aliens". I'm not sure why they
need to throw the word "alien" in there when just being able to capture "at-
large, convicted criminals" is reason enough. It shouldn't really matter that
they were aliens. I'm guessing it is to garner some bias against such a system
since specifically targeting illegal aliens seems to be a constant hot button.

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Wingman4l7
Here's the surprisingly thorough Wikipedia page:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition)

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sfjailbird
I wonder how long before they just put mandatory tracking chips in cars,
rather than monkey patching it with expensive OCR machines on the road and in
patrols vehicles.

~~~
otoburb
Probably not too long, especially if they offered insurance premium discounts
for willing early-adopter participants.

~~~
Wingman4l7
I'm a little surprised there aren't already insurance premium discounts for
installing a "black box" to record accident data.

 _EDIT: Apparently there already are, both in the US and elsewhere -- see
below comments. Next time I'll Google this before posting, I promise! =D_

~~~
PotatoEngineer
I'm in a driving study right now that installed a black box (plus a couple of
cameras) in my car, to see how people drive. The study took care to make sure
that the recorded footage and sensor data can't be accessed during any
incident; it's encrypted, they resist requests from the police, etc.

In a related note, I can't cross US borders until the driving study is over;
the border police are Not Amused at being recorded, and the researchers really
discourage trying to cross a US border in the car that the gear is installed
in.

