
That sign telling you how fast you’re driving may be capturing license plates - collinmanderson
https://qz.com/1400791/that-road-sign-telling-you-how-fast-youre-driving-may-be-part-of-a-us-government-surveillance-network/
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loser777
Enforcing speed when the intent is _public_ _safety_ rather than _revenue_
_generation_ requires more nuance than what the current system in the US has
to offer.

Does it make sense to strictly enforce a 20 or 25 mph limit in areas with
residential/pedestrian traffic? Certainly, especially given that pedestrians
crossing a street are essentially at a 25 mph speed difference relative to
perpendicular traffic. But if we apply this arithmetic to semi trailers
traveling at 65 mph on the highway, a 25 mph difference would suggest a speed
limit of 90 mph, even neglecting the safety difference in a vehicle-vehicle
collision.

Where are most current speeding tickets issued? Is it in low-speed,
residential areas where drivers know that an extra 5 mph won't save them any
time at all (and would greatly increase the risk of injury in an accident)? Or
is it in high-speed straights on the highway where an extra 15 mph can save
you hours on long trips (where a speed limit effectively grandfathered from
the malaise era still applies)?

Another consideration: if speed enforcement on highways was so critical to
public safety, why are radar detectors and even laser jammers legal in many US
jurisdictions? My perception is that physics-based policy decisions never get
far in the US system. Ultimately, automated enforcement/better technology
seems orthogonal to the policy problem. We should get the policy right first.

~~~
imgabe
> Is it in low-speed, residential areas where drivers know that an extra 5 mph
> won't save them any time at all (and would greatly increase the risk of
> injury in an accident)?

Based on my personal experience in such areas, drivers very much do _not_ know
this. The number of people speeding down residential streets in my city just
to get to a red light at the end of a block is astonishing.

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jstanley
> “We don’t know when somebody’s going to commit a crime, we don’t know when
> somebody’s going to run over somebody and take off,” said Joe Giacalone. “So
> that data should be there forever. We never know when we’re going to need
> it.”

That's a pretty tone-deaf response.

~~~
stretchwithme
I don't see a problem with individuals keeping track of what vehicles or
people coming into their neighborhoods or on their property. Or with
remembering that for a long time.

If government needs to know, they can ask the public to check their records or
get a court order if they suspect a specific route was taken during the
commission of a crime.

Do I want authorities to be able to track dissidents wherever they go? No.

~~~
brainwad
If you don't see a problem with individuals keeping track of who comes onto
their property, what's the problem with the government keeping track of who
comes onto their property (i.e. public space)?

Yet again, privacy advocates are trying introduce privacy into the public
sphere, where it has no place. Privacy is to protect what you do in private,
not what you do in public.

~~~
adrianN
The difference is that individuals can't build a database that covers almost
all public space and allows for large scale data mining, while governments
can.

~~~
brainwad
Individuals who owned a lot of property definitely could. It's just a matter
of degree, not a fundamental difference between individuals and government.

~~~
pmiller2
Also consider that said “individuals” may be corporations.

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TeMPOraL
Meh.

On the one hand, I'm against tracking everyone, everywhere. On the other hand,
I'm totally _for_ ALPRs dispensing indiscriminate justice on people violating
speed limits. I wish we could have auditable, trustworthy ALPR boxes that only
report speed violations to be immediately turned into tickets, and don't store
license plate numbers of people who follow the law.

~~~
adrianN
I really don't understand why we don't enforce speed limits more rigorously.
We have the technology to do this at basically zero cost and speeding is one
of the main causes of death on the road. Especially in residential areas where
pedestrians and cyclists are around even moderate speeding dramatically
increases the chances of deadly accidents. Doing 30mph instead of 20mph
increases the chance of death for pedestrians from 5% to 45%. [1]

[1]
[http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm](http://www.humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm)

~~~
raverbashing
Because speed limits are mostly arbitrary, your speedometer might be not as
accurate as you expect and it's very easy to set a "speed trap"

Driving 50% over the limit is dangerous, fining people for going 2mph over is
just "creating revenue".

~~~
adrianN
If you feel that your speedometer is not accurate you can always err on the
side of safety and drive a little slower than allowed. Perhaps your brakes or
your reaction time aren't as good as you think either. Besides, typical radar
traps have an error of around 3km/h or 3%, whatever is larger, so it's
unlikely that your speedometer is wrong enough to matter.

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bradfa
Your car likely gets its picture taken, and probably license plate
automatically read, every time you drive through a toll booth, too. No one
seems to be outraged over toll booths doing this, so why should any other
public road sign (or private road sign that you, the driver, don't own) be any
different?

Don't like being tracked by _YOUR_ plate? Find other ways to achieve your
transportation goals: ride a bike, take the bus, walk, use a taxi and pay
cash, borrow a car, etc. Sure, you could be tracked by facial recognition but
that's a lot harder to do currently than reading some very well defined
characters from a highly visible license plate and it's much easier to legally
change your appearance than to change your plate.

~~~
maxerickson
The ACLU says _Any entity that uses license plate readers should be required
to report_.

[https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-
trac...](https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-tracking/you-
are-being-tracked)

That kind of sounds inclusive of toll booths.

~~~
ectospheno
Their 5 desired behaviors are admirable. The 2nd item, "The government must
not store data about innocent people for any lengthy period." is hard to
implement given existing police department budgets. The only way for you to
know you can delete is to perform an investigation to verify you can delete.
Doing that every few months on each plate isn't reasonable. You could speed up
the process by having a national database but I imagine they would be even
less happy about that.

I love the ACLU. I donate monthly. I fear a US without the ACLU far more than
I fear a US with the ACLU. But every now and then I don't think they have
completely thought out the opposing point of view or the realities of time and
money.

~~~
maxerickson
I don't understand your logic. Why can't they just delete any information that
isn't part of an active investigation? Because they don't want to take any
heat from pro-authoritarians in the case that a later investigation could have
used the evidence?

In the past police departments have been happy enough to just ignore rape kits
for years and years. I guess people would flip their shit if unprocessed rape
kits were destroyed, but that's specific evidence...

------
jobigoud
With advances in technology, the trend is that we are more and more able to
catch speeding, red light passing, and other infractions. And it turns out a
lot of people are eventually doing some.

I'm wondering what would be the consequences of a truly omniscient system,
where each and every infraction would be immediately caught. We could maybe
have mandatory black boxes in vehicles that transmit the infraction in real
time.

It seems with a truly complete system, every driver would eventually run out
of points on their license and wouldn't be allowed to drive anymore.

~~~
btrettel
I don't think following the rules of the road the vast majority of the time is
that hard. Yes, you will make mistakes from time to time, but any reasonable
system would recognize that. And sometimes following the law is less safe, but
that's extremely rare in my experience. The problem is that many drivers, if
not the majority of drivers, have no problem _intentionally_ breaking the law
as it suits them (e.g., speeding, unsafe passing, etc.).

I am a cyclist who rides with a helmet camera. It's amazing how much this
seems to change some drivers' behavior. One moment they're rude and/or
dangerous, the next they are keeping their distance and driving the speed
limit. These drivers _choose_ to drive dangerously because they think it saves
time. (I'd argue the time savings are much smaller than they believe.) These
people are the ones I think an automated system would catch, and I have no
problem with that.

(As a cyclist, I follow the law to the letter, by the way. You will not catch
me running reds. In fact, I have gone through the local police's stop sign
enforcement efforts twice and passed.)

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reacweb
There are a lot of burglaries in France. The recognition of license plates
combined with mobile phone location information would make it possible to
identify burglars and even catch them in the act. All the data are available,
it would be sufficient to collect them for analysis.

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dzdt
The "Vigilant" database mentioned is actually a product of a private company.
There is essentially zero limitation or oversight on what they do with license
plate data. From the point of view of the law, there is no expectation of
privacy on a public street. One of their main customer bases are people who
"recover" vehicles where the buyer is not keeping up with loan payments. They
have thousands of private cameras in operation, making an ever expanding
private dragnet available to anyone with the money to buy the data.

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Jmcdd
Looks like the US is getting ANPR
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recog...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition_in_the_United_Kingdom)

~~~
BrentOzar
Big US cities have had mobile license plate readers for a while:

[https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/13/cpd-license-plate-
re...](https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/02/13/cpd-license-plate-readers/)

Just not coordinated at the national level yet. It would be pretty expensive
given the size of the country, the number of police vehicles involved, and the
current cost per vehicle.

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ryanmarsh
There’s RFID antennas everywhere grabbing your toll tag number. Frankly this
is a drop in the ocean of much more precise and voluminous data gathering on
you. This one is the least of my worries.

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TomMarius
It doesn't sometimes?

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INTPenis
I hope it is, that's where I'd put the camera if I was in charge. Makes a lot
of sense.

Only problem with that theory is that regular speed trap cameras are designed
to be easily managed. Easily washed and easily replaced. So the end result is
a big almost tower-like structure that in my country sometimes is empty
depending on where they've deployed the actual camera, which sits inside this
tower.

So placing a seemingly hidden camera inside a digital sign has some
challenges. Like for example servicability and cleaning. Cars produce a lot of
grit so having a large lens area that is easily cleaned actually helps.

They also work at night by using flash, which also requires some structure
that might be visible.

