License Plate Tracking for the Average Citizen

Wired News is reporting that big-brother license plate tracking systems may soon be available to the average citizen. Privacy advocates, however, worry that personal information and associated movement could be used inappropriately by marketing companies. From the article: "Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says."

Comments

Big brother here we come!

[IntelliAdmin]

Wow. This is really big brother. Essentially they put these on top of cop cars an the thing just starts searching 360 for license plates and drops them in the system. The trick would be to have enough police cars fitted with them to give back good data. Also it would not help track the car if it were in someone's garage.

Good Excerpt from the article:

LPR cameras, which are usually around the size of a can of tomato sauce, can be mounted on police cruisers and powered by cigarette lighters. As the car moves, the camera bounces infrared light off other vehicles' license plates. The camera reads the plates and feeds them to a laptop in real time, where information from an FBI or local database can tell an officer if the car is hot. Some systems can read up to 60 plates per second, and they work at highway speeds and acute angles.

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Re:Big brother here we come!

[ranton]

I cannot wait for this information to be easy and cheap to obtain. Imagine how much better GPS navigation systems would be if they always had real time data of traffic patterns, even if you live in a small midwestern town.

Everyone seams to complain about information like this being used for marketing reasons, but I for one think that is probably the best use for it. I like the idea of marketing companies actually targeting me with things I may want, instead of crap I would never use because they do not have enough information. I am the president of a small niche software company, and any information we are able to gain from their program usage only helps us give them a better product.

We arent losing any freedoms with a system like this. It isnt like the government is keeping this ultra-secret database about us secret, it is open for any company to use. And it does open up possibilities for those companies to offer consumer services that would otherwise be impossible. I see it as a net gain for society.

Although too bad I may soon have to watch my speeding a little bit more.
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Re:Big brother here we come!

[stienman]

This is, technically, big brother - it is the technology to make this process cheaper (the process is already possible and available to anyone - just stand on a corner and collect information).

There is no big reason to fear this any more than there is reason to fear the fact that the phone company has a record of every phone call you've ever made. They have, undoubtedly, used that information internally in research projects to form network diagrams and could very well do the 6-degrees game if they felt so inclined.

I can see how it might be profitable to know where I've been, and where and when I might not be at home/work/etc. This will certainly cause me to think more about personal security. But it won't shed light on any activities that I don't want people to know about.

In small towns everyone knew about everyone else, and still kept quiet and were civil - within reason - because they all had to live together. I think this notion of "public privacy" where one should be able to go to the store without anyone knowing is a relatively new desire, and quite frankly many, if not most, fears of losing it are overblown.

But think about the possibilities if this technology - I'll call this "public neutrality" where I, as an endpoint user of the public space am not restricted from what I can and cannot record and analyze.

I've been thinking about this technology for some time. What I'd like to have is a HUD, this license plate reader, and an internet connection. Then we simply need to develop CML - car markup language.

Above every car messages about that car from other drivers are displayed, not unlike photo tags.
Litterer
Doesn't signal
Has gun
Tailgater
Cell phoner stoner
Plain stupid
etc.
Then we can do the same with facial recognition systems.

Use GPS, a 3 axis magnetometer, and a 3 axis accelerometer and you can mark up buildings and other physically stationary objects.

Then - and this is the next cool bit - you build all this into a flashlight. But the flashlight is actually a miniature handheld projecter. You can actually shine it around without wearing a HUD and it'll paint the tags on whatever you're pointing at for everyone else to see. You could print the "loser" on someone's forehead.

Of course, I've just described several patentable ideas. They are now public domain, assuming they have not yet been applied for. So go out and make them already!

In the rare chance that someone needs to use this as prior art in 10-20 years, contact me at http://ubasics.com. If you want me to build them, contact me sooner.

And if someone is curious about where my car is or has been for the last while, no need to spend thousands of dollars on cameras, just check out my tracking system. (please note that it is active only during testing periods. Go back a few thousand points and you'll find my trip to Georgia and Alabama. Let me know if you can determine which of my relatives I visited and how I'm related - that would be interesting detective work.)

-Adam

Re:Big brother here we come!

[ranton]

any information we are able to gain from their program usage only helps us give them a better product.

You are incorrect. It helps you gain a greater profit, which is not reinvested in the product.

Actually you are incorrect. I was not just talking about greater profit, I am talking about actual features added. By knowing what parts of the program people use the most, we can find what areas to spend the most development time on. Instead of just listening to the loudest complainers, we can help all of our customers.

Of course that also translates into greater profits (or at least continued profit), but that is because it is a business. That is the only motivation for improving a product for most businesses. I like to think that I actually improve my product just to have a sense of pride in it; but I would be doing my employees a disservice if I wasnt thinking of them and their families by making sure they still have a job.
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Re:Big brother here we come!

[ranton]

You could just ask your customers about the information you need. Oh, wait, that's too intrusive. Ok, go ahead and spy on them.

Actually, asking our customers is faaaaar more intrusive. Who wants to have phone calls from every company they buy from to fill out surveys? And it usually is not as good of information anyway.

Most customers have no idea what they want. They want 20 more buttons on the screen, but they also think the screen is too "busy" looking. They never do actual analysis of what parts of the program they use the most. They just think about what they used the most yesterday, not the two years before that. They never think about how cost effective it might be to add a feature, or whether it would effect other customers.

We do listen to our customers, and provide as many means as we can for them to give us feedback. But it is not very efficient or effective for that to be our only way of getting information about our customers. And most of this information has little to do with just improving profit. It is about actually making the software better. If we succeed at making the software better then it of course does mean more profit, but isnt that how it should be?
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This is damned good stuff

[A nonymous Coward]

I love this kind of stuff. Right now, power to snoop is in the hands of the rich and powerful. If the mayor of Dallas gets a bug up his butt about a neighbor he doesn't like, or a competing politician bothers him enough, he has a lot more resources at his control than the neighbor or opponent. But when things like this become available to the average joe, there's will be a lot more people interested in where the mayor's car goes than the other way round.

Same with public cameras. Once we get cameras all over the place, whether controlled by private citizens, or whether public cameras which everyone can see instead of just the cops, a lot more ordinary joes will be observing the rich and powerful than vice versa.

The Colt revolver was the great equalizer of the 1800s, making the average person just as deadly as those who had the time to practice swordsmanship. Computer cameras like these license plate readers and public webcams will be the great equalizer of the 2000s. I relish the equalization of power these will bring.

Not the point

[A nonymous Coward]

The point of TFA is that these are becoming cheap enough to allow ordinary people to set them up, not just the cops.

I want this stuff made available to the general public. I don't want it to be the private data of the cops, or the politicians who control the cops. I want everybody to be able to snoop on those politicians just as they snoop on the people they want to control.

Everything old is new again

[swid27]

Until very recently (5-7 years ago), companies in rural areas of the U.S. (well, in rural Nebraska, at least) would give away books that contained:

• Two maps of the county: one showing the ownership of land parcels, the other showed residences (with the names of the current occupants)
• A complete listing of license plates in that county.

The license plate listing section of theses books went away because of privacy concerns. I guess that didn't last very long...

Police Already Use Info Inappropriately

[__aajwxe560]

License plate information is already used inappropriately by police officers. This past weekend, 3 Boston Police officers were arrested on a string of charges. One of them includes, "In conversations with his associates, he was proud of his ability to spot easy marks for identity theft: He ran the license plate numbers of expensive cars he encountered in routine traffic stops through police systems to get to the owners' private information. With the help of a worker at a local bank, he picked off those with the best credit ratings." (Article found at http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art icles/2006/07/22/pulidos_club_offered_sex_drugs_pr osecutors_say/).

I can't see this information becoming more easily accessible the least bit comforting or reassuring.

Re:Police Already Use Info Inappropriately

[AeroIllini]

He ran the license plate numbers of expensive cars he encountered in routine traffic stops through police systems to get to the owners' private information. With the help of a worker at a local bank, he picked off those with the best credit ratings.

Now wait a minute. There are two separate issues here.

The police officer has every right to run cars' license plates through the police systems and pull up the owners' private information, including names, addresses, ages, and driving/criminal records. However, the reason he was arrested was because he and his banker friend illegally used those names to obtain credit report information. A police officer cannot dig any further into a private citizen's records (other than what exists in the police database) without a warrant, and that is where he was wrong. The existance of license plate snooping in private citizens' hands is no different, because they do not legally have access to police records, credit reports, or anything else they cannot obtain right now without such snooping devices. It does not change the amount of information they have access to, it only changes the speed with which they can collect that information.

Just because it is possible to commit a crime with something does not necessitate outlawing that thing altogether. Snooping devices in the hands of private citizens is a Good Thing (tm), because it rebalances the power between the authorities and the citizens. This license plate reader is not doing anything new, since people really could just drive around all day and keep a written log of all the license plates, locations, and times on the trip, and use that information to track movements. This device just does that logging faster than a person can. And I can imagine all kinds of uses for these devices to track the authorities by private citizens. Imagine that you can upload your tracking data to a website along with lots of other people in the same town, and track the movements of the fleet of police vehicles in your town. You'd be able to see exactly how much time they spend in the speed trap on the freeway, and how much time they spend parked at the local donut shop. The possibilities are rather intriguing.

Tracking for Profit - Paparazzi Style

[PIPBoy3000]

I can't wait until someone sets up a bounty system for this. Essentially people would buy and mount one of these on their cars and drive around "interesting" areas. License plates would be tracked and sent to a central database with a GPS and time stamp. You could then purchase tracking information for certain license plates, with a portion of the proceeds going back to the original owner.

Essentially you'd end up with "bounty hunters" cruising bad parts of town looking for stolen vehicles and the like. On the other end, you'd have people driving around L.A. and New York, trying to figure out which celebrity is staying and whose home for the night.

Think of it as Little Brother.

IR Reflector

[crnbrdeater]

I have seen IR polymer films with the ability to reflect IR wave lenghts but allow the visible spectrum to pass through mostly unobstructed. A piece of this stuff could be easily trimmed to fit in your plate frame. Sounds like it would render your plate invisible to this reader.

Already Here?

[AugustZephyr]

Isn't this technology all over the place in the form of red light and speed zone cameras? It was just a matter of time until they put these units in the actual police cruisers. Anyways, its not like they cant already see the picture of a postage stamp on the sidewalk from spy satelites.

David Brin

[dagr8tim]

David Brin did a very wonderful essay called "The Transparent Society". Where basically he argued that all camera's like stop light camera's, street corner camera's, and all of this big brother stuff should be open to the public to view. His idea was "Who Watches the Watchers" in order to keep government honest. Not to mention the theory that more people watching technically means more chance to be caught doing something wrong which increases the deterrent factor. Ofcourse I know if a criminal has thier mind set on a crime, not amount of deterrent will stop him. Also, just for fun, here's David Brin's Wiki article.

Easy defeat?

[hotspotbloc]

Couldn't you just set up a few IR LEDs around the plate (or one big one drilled into the center of the plate) to flood out the picture? I'm guessing these systems use a camera that normally records in the IR spectrum by default. It can't be that easy but ...