

Data Brokers Are Now Selling Your Car's Location For $10 Online - bigiain
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-broker-offers-new-service-showing-where-they-have-spotted-your-car/

======
guelo
This is nothing compared to what cops are putting together, gathering data
from all their tag reader cameras including ones monitoring popular roads and
ones attached to police cars. And aggregating it at regional "fusion centers".

[http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-
polic...](http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-police-
collect-millions-records-drivers-4883)

~~~
bigiain
That's a great/terrifying link.

I'd love to know the justification the city of San Leandro use to explain why
they're keeping photographic records of cars, owners, and their families - and
just how uptight the police/city-officials would be if I took photos of them
and their families in their driveways at the rate of "1000s every eight
hours"…

~~~
diminoten
Devil's advocate: Why would they need justification to at least keep records
of where your licence plate has been in public? What expectation of privacy do
you have?

~~~
bigiain
As elsewhere, the expectation of "just another face in the crowd" pseudo-
privacy.

When we (as a society, by which I mean my grandparents parents) agreed to have
"unique identifiers" prominently displayed on vehicles we own, the reasoning
behind that decision was based on a different reality.

This is _very much_ scope-creep - without anyone affected being asked whether
it's OK.

If there was a proposal to have police all stop 1000 people per shift to check
and record their ID, people and civil liberty groups would be up in arms
(perhaps literally).

Is this _very_ much different? Shouldn't we at least have had a discussion
about it before rolling it out without letting anybody know what was going on?

~~~
diminoten
Does "just another face in the crowd" pseudo-privacy have any legal precedent?

------
tokenadult
"Of five cars that I looked up, three cars turned up nothing, but I found data
on the other two.

"One car had a single sighting: it was parked on Manhattan’s Upper West Side
at 12:40 in the morning last December."

This squares with my use of databases sold to lawyers, doing look-ups on
myself and close family members. The databases are much less impressive in
their power than salesmen suggest. I'm not worried about this. I won't be
worried about this, and eventually when most cars are self-driving and many
cars are paid for by the use and ridden by many different passengers, license
plate recognition will be less informative than ever.

To be sure, aggregating a whole lot of data can add up in its impact. MIT has
developed a tool with which you can analyze all of your own Gmail metadata

[https://immersion.media.mit.edu/](https://immersion.media.mit.edu/)

(I learned about this from a submission to HN from ColinWright, which alas
received little discussion here), and I found out from that tool that my use
of email is more business-related than I realized: all of the top seven
"collaborators" (that program's term) that I have are actual work colleagues,
as well as personal friends. A megabyte here, a megabyte there, and pretty
soon all the data turn into information. But really the victims here often
enough will be the chump clients who pay for license plate record searches and
don't find out anything worthwhile.

~~~
edoloughlin
_eventually when most cars are self-driving and many cars are paid for by the
use and ridden by many different passengers, license plate recognition will be
less informative than ever_

Except that then they'll have credit cards matched to continuous GPS data.

~~~
dredmorbius
Time to find a bitcoin car-share.

------
jrockway
Is this the same company that owns all the speeding and red light cameras? If
so, what a brilliant way to further monetize their monopoly. "Public safety",
indeed.

(One thing I like about riding a bicycle is that you are mostly anonymous, and
nobody is going to show up with a picture of you running a red light a couple
months later. Of course, once these companies start doing facial recognition
based on pictures of you tagged by your friends on social networks...)

~~~
cinquemb
Two years ago in my E & M lab, one of my profs was showing off on of his
research projects into materials with negative permeability and negative
permittivity… it started to make me think about if people could have
clothes(or objects) and spray a lining of these type of materials on them, it
could render them "invisible" to traditional optics… Isn't the military doing
research like this too? I know they work close with academia as well…

~~~
D9u
There has been license plate blocking technology for sale for quite some time
now, which is definitely more low-tech than James Bond style license plate
changers.

[http://www.phantomplate.com/photoblocker.html](http://www.phantomplate.com/photoblocker.html)

~~~
maxerickson
Mythbusters had worse luck than the local media at your link:

[http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-
da...](http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/way-
to-beat-police-speed-cameras.htm)

------
codezero
It's too bad current vehicle codes forbid you from obscuring your plate at all
at any time, this makes it illegal to hide your identity from would be data
collectors, which makes protecting yourself very difficult. I suppose you
could just go without plates like Steve Jobs did and pay the fix-it tickets
you end up getting.

Personally, I tend to forget to pay my registration for a solid 6 months
before I finally get pulled over for it every year, and it costs me about $35
extra, so if this becomes pervasive, it might be worth considering losing the
plates. I'm willing to bet that some officers would even be slightly
sympathetic if you explained your reasoning, not that they wouldn't still give
you a ticket, but maybe.

~~~
res0nat0r
But there has never been any expectation of privacy when in public. Especially
when it comes to something regulated like driving a car. Should there be some
change in the law now forbidding collecting licence plate data because it is
easier to do en-masse?

~~~
reeses
That's the question, isn't it? LE uses facial recognition to scan crowds. Now
cars are tracked, not using GPS, an observing officer, or a member of the
public (who may need to report a crime), but by snarfing video of all the
license plates with a geolocated camera, timestamping and OCRing them, and
storing the resulting information.

The next thing that pops into my head is the fingerprint. Not because it's
"easy" to get, but you also have no reasonable expectation of privacy with
them.

Imagine the embarrassment when "no two fingerprints are alike" is finally
disproven as some poor bastard is arrested and charged with a crime committed
by another person solely on the basis of his thumbprint.

~~~
bigiain
It doesn't seem to embarrass prosecutors too much when they jail someone for
five months based on "conclusive DNA evidence" \- even though the suspect was
in hospital with a blood alcohol reading on 0.4 from two hours before the
crime to 12 hours afterwards. And who'd been take to hospital by the same
ambulance crew that attended the crime later on and moved the victim… You can
see where this is going right? - "The paramedics physically moved both
Anderson and Kumra, resulting in the inadvertent DNA transfer…"

How on earth can someone end up in jail for five months under those
circumstances?

(Note too, the other suspect jailed for seven months - for, several months
before the killing, posting a photo of the future-victim's house to
Instagram…)

[http://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2013/06/28/how-
innocent-m...](http://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2013/06/28/how-innocent-
mans-dna-was-found-at-killing-scene/)

------
homeomorphic
Forget the cars. How long before people accept discounts on Google glass (or
similar) in exchange for continuously running face recognition software and
streaming the information back to some company providing a similar service
where you can look up people instead of cars?

"User #129334, we have detected a person of interest in your field of view. A
client would like Enhanced Position Information (TM) on this individual. Nod
if you agree to keep him in sight for the next hour and receive a month of
free cable!"

For a long time we've enjoyed the goods arising from the fact that technology
can rarely be stopped. I have a feeling we'll see some awful things in the
coming decade... It unsettles me greatly that I have this newfound fear or
technology, but I really do.

------
veidr
It's a done deal: everywhere your car with a license plate goes is and will be
tracked, and stored forever.

It's already happening, it is already cheap, and there's no way to stop it
short of a _massive_ swell of public support for enacting laws to limit it --
in the USA, that seems very unlikely.

What I think is important to extrapolate from this stuff is that everything we
can do with license plate recognition now will soon be doable with facial
recognition.

Tracking everywhere your car has been and storing the record forever is one
thing. It's very hard to imagine that tracking everywhere your _face_ has been
isn't the next step.

------
baltcode
So who is actually going around photographing the cars? Do they have regular
employees, fixed cameras, or do people just turn in photographs for small
change?

~~~
Amadou
Repo men.

There is at least one company that works with repo men - they put ANPR cameras
on the repo men's dashboards, it records every plate that comes into view and
uploads it in near real-time to a central databases along with gps info. Any
repo man who subscribes to the service can put out an alert for a plate, once
that plate of interest shows up in the central database they get a text
message telling then when and where it was scanned. When I first heard about
these guys a few years ago they already had a very large number of repomen
participating in the service.

I am not surprised to hear that the companies have expanded their market
beyond repomen, that is the nature of databases - once you've got the data
centralized all kinds of ideas come up for how to exploit it.

~~~
vijayr
And all of this is legal? Does this mean anyone can put up a camera on his
dashboard, roof and capture these info?

~~~
Amadou
Yes, in the US, the current state of the law is that anything done in public
is fair game for anyone - there is no expectation of privacy when in public.

However, this point of law was determined back in the late 60's or early 70's,
back when the concept of an indexed database of millions of permanent records
of essentially everybody in public was barely even the stuff of science
fiction, much less everyday fact. I think we are long overdue for a
revaluation of the legal situation given the drastic change in circumstances
of the last 40 years.

------
coldcode
Life begins to suck more every day, soon everyone will know everything about
all of us. I wonder what an open source life will be like.

~~~
wladimir
Agree about the sucking part. But IMO the problem is not that everyone will
know everything about everyone. That would be weird (utopian?) but kind of
fair.

The fear is about the rich and privileged knowing everything about the poor
and underprivileged (using databases that are expensive, protected by IP laws,
and/or require clearance), and opaqueness the other way around. Information as
a means of control.

