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!

[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

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.