
When an experiment with existing technology does a “good enough” job - happy-go-lucky
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-replicated-an-86-million-project-in-57-lines-of-code-277031330ee9
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Recursing
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121020)

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primitivesuave
I attended a Cisco-sponsored IoT conference in 2014 where they showed a live
demonstration of ANPR on the streets of Chicago, and actually managed to catch
a stolen car during the demonstration. I had my car stolen in LA and would
gladly sacrifice some vehicular privacy to give a network of dashcams the
opportunity to recover it (it was eventually recovered many days later,
ransacked and with a lot of damage).

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james_pm
Police in Toronto have been doing this for years. Specifically, some parking
enforcement cars have plate scanners on them that look for stolen vehicles as
they drive around.

Ontario Provincial Police also scans plates for cars with violations (stolen,
expired registration, etc.).

The former (stolen car search) I don't have a problem with as long as the
scanning is 100% limited to searching for stolen cars and destroyed as soon as
the car is determined to be not stolen.

The latter (scanning for registration issues, etc.) is a different issue. I am
not in favour of this kind of automated "law enforcement".

Data retention is a big issue with these kinds of systems. They might say they
only use the data to find stolen cars, but if the data is stored or retained
and then can be used in other investigations or for other types of enforcement
via data mining...that's a slippery slope.

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primitivesuave
I like this perspective, it's the right balance between privacy and effective
policing. If the data persisted over a long period of time, you could use it
to determine where someone travels and subsequently what activities they
engage in and who they are connected to.

As for automated law enforcement, I find it just creates a private market for
subversion and doesn't really improve safety (e.g. many GPS systems will warn
you about speeding cameras placed along the road so you can slow down in
time).

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kermitonit
Australian cop cars already have fixed cameras that do rego checks... how do I
know this... I got pulled over for expired registration and the cops told me
as soon as the camera saw them while they drove past me it flagged up on their
onboard computer...

