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Repo Men Using New Technology To Track Cars
kamapuaa writes "The NY Times has an article about how real-time license plate scanning is changing the car repo business. MVTRAC is one of several companies providing technology to track car license plates automatically, in order to populate private databases. This new tech is used by car repo companies to help banks or other lenders repossess cars; by police to find stolen cars or to locate ticket scofflaws; or really for whatever application MVTRAC and its competitors feel like pursuing, as the new-found industry lacks any kind of government oversight."
...for stalkers.
Time to ban!
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
$600/mo ? you could take a webcam and run it through any ocr software and get the same result for less than $600/month.
wtf ?
find my internet girlfriend?
she said she went to school yesterday, but my best friend Mike who says he's in her class didn't see her at all, and that she hasn't taught class all week..
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
I'm sorry, driving is not a right in the US.
John
The automobile is cultural heroin, and countries, as they "modernize", are lining up at the pusher's corner.
Why does somebody driving down the (public) road taking a picture of your (public) license plate on your car parked in (public) plain view and comparing it to a list need oversight?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Almost any industry lacks oversight in the US, that is why that place is a litigious wild west.
They had this technology twenty years ago. It mainly consisted of Rain Man memorizing license plate numbers.
As a "nosy citizen with enough cash," I have been waiting to find out if the mayor is having an affair by tracking his plates. The ACLU doesn't like it but nobody cares. Or do they?
Plate scanning systems are just a fast way to do what repo folks have been doing for years. They still need to verify the VIN, and in some areas present Claim and Delivery paperwork to repo a vehicle.
Lots of car buyers try to rip off dealers, and instead of working out payments (most dealers would rather have incoming money than a car sitting on the lot) they disappear with the car.
Plate scanners also offer a way to catch uninsured drivers (= "people who don't care if they can pay for the damage they cause when they run into the rest of us) and tax scofflaws.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"The life of a repo man is always intense."
I've long said that we'll lose our privacy to business before we lose it to a totalitarian state. It's pretty obvious that under a laissez-faire system some parties will happily sell information about anyone to other parties public and private who are interested in being Big Brother for reasons of power or profit.
This is happening now with license plates. It's starting to happen with human image recognition, and will likely be pervasive in our lifetimes. It'll start with systems like this, it'll grow through systems in retail establishments -- some enterprising business will pitch them on the idea "Wouldn't it be great if you knew *who* was coming into your store? Let us set you up with a system that not only records and manages your video, but actually cross-references it with an image/identity database." They'll sell it to consumers, too: "Wouldn't it be great if you knew who was coming to your door? Who secondhand guests at your party are?" And now that we have social networks, it'll be even *easier* to bootstrap with a corpus of social tagged photos which are available to, say, anybody who sings up for the Facebook development platform. And of course, they'll eventually make a deal to share data with local, state, and federal governments. Or if that's technically illegal, with the contractors said government outsource photo surveillance functions to.
And you'll need one hell of a disguise something like a Philip Dick's scramble suit in order to move around society anonymously... if such a thing can actually disguise your identifying gesture and movement habits successfully. If you can come up with something that isn't clearly a disguise that would make people suspicious. If such a thing is even allowed by retailers and citizens who *like* knowing who's coming to their door. If they're not illegal in some way, whether by statute or sheer fact that even wearing one looks like probable cause for suspicion to the police.
Tweet, tweet.
The easiest way is to track the alien in the trunk.
From a legal standpoint there is nothing wrong with this. The fact that a vehicle with a certain license number is at a certain location is public information and there is no reasonable assumption of privacy. Anyone walking down the street can gather this information. The use of vehicles and tag scanners just makes it faster. If they were logging license numbers of vehicles in locked garages, private property not visible from the street, etc then there would be an issue as there is an assumption of privacy and laws (B&E, trespassing, etc) would have to be broken to obtain the information.
This service just centralizes what is already done by the parking authority of every major city; ever watch "Parking Wars"? All it does is allows more organizations access to the same database of vehicle locations.
Who is able to obtain this information is a different story. Either by regulation or industry standard this information should only be given to organizations who have a legitimate need for it; repo, law enforcement, etc. It should not be given to every person who wants to track someone else. Stalking is a concern and should be addressed.
The use of public information and technology to catch deadbeats and lawbreakers is not a bad thing.
Remember all the screaming when Booosh!!! and the EEEVIL Rethuglicans kept passing extensions to the Patriot Act?
Guess what?
IT'S STILL HAPPENING!
Yeah, putting something like this new industry under the control of THAT goverment is going the HELP our privacy. Crap, that government would just figure out a new way to shake down the companies for free trips to warm places.
Who cares if people know where your car is? Sure, it's an "invasion of privacy", but what's the big deal?
... never leads to abuse of privacy rights or anything.
MVTRAC is simply a tool to speed the process of what is and has been available for over 30 years. MVTRAC users cannot access your license plate information, registration or any other information. The system simply takes information already provided and makes it instantly available at the moment, versus having to dig through paperwork or look something up. Everyone should realize there are and have been legitimate laws governing the sharing of information that disallow both people and companies from accessing information, both public record or otherwise, without satisfying a plethora of criteria.
Now you could run, you could hide... You could try to. But he always has a way of finding you.
Reeepo Maaan! Reeepo Maaan!
and from a privacy standpoint that means the law itself is in need of an update.
You can start with "corporations are not people" and therefore the freedoms we protect for humans don't apply to corporations except when we want them to. Any time corporations start doing stuff against the public interest, we can ban it, even if it's something we're free to do as individuals.
And sure, the individuals involved can keep doing that stuff--but then they lose the liability protection that led them to assemble into corporations they way they are now.
It's almost as necessary to live as water, food, shelter and clothing.
In NJ, PA, NY, CT, CA, and I forget what other state, if you let your own doctor find out during an appointment that you had a seizure or other loss of consciousness, or if someone calls 911 to report one to an ambulance/ER, state law requires the first doctor who finds out to fax the DMV immediately, so they can suspend your license as they would after a long string of DUIs. (He added, with the faintest trace of bitterness.) Specifically, if you get into an accident determined to have stemmed from this then the doctor bears culpability and is on the hook for any damages or casualties that result. I've spent my entire life living in NJ, NY, PA, and CA, and I've been pedestrianized by every single one of them.
Having a reliable warning period of several minutes before seizures makes no difference legally. (This is just continued whining now.) But tactically it makes a huge difference. I managed to hide my condition from the medical community in California for several years. I fibbed to doctors and didn't let them know. If I saw an aura from a rising seizure, I made an immediate exit and found a good place to hide (or I ran outside, into the woods, wherever). This worked pretty well but it all came to an end when I got stuck in a line at Fry's Electronics. I can't even remember what bullshit was in my hands, but it definitely wasn't worth it, especially overpriced Fry's bullshit with tricky return policies and bad support and fucking rebates to mail in. I probably collapsed because my brain was making a desperate attempt to stop the purchase. Now I'm riding a bike six miles to work to get my water, food, shelter etc. Driving is definitely a privilege. So remember as you drive, not all bicyclists are exercising yuppies. Some of us are just fucked.
I recollect that computation, imaging hardware and certain algorithms were considered "munitions". They were banned from export due to their possible use in weapons and as intelligence devices.
This kind of thing is no different. I now see it as a deep incorporation into our civilian domains of military grade technologies. Information age demands an information equivalent of "posse comitatus" and organizations/corporations such as this could be viewed as illegal private militias.
Culturally, we are dangerous fundamentalists, as rabid as any other.. it is just that we see technology as the ultimate saviour and solver of all problems.. it just ain't so.
That Sucks! Really. Not kidding. But, most people don't give a shit. They could give a fuck less if you get run over repeatedly by a BMW. Fuck you for being less than perfect.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
...if it is legal to mount your license plate upside down -- and whether it would fool such systems.
Not only are the incentives to collect and sell this information already present in the system, arguments such as yours will be convincing to a significant portion of the population and in the framework of the existing legal system. People might *say* they want privacy, but a lot of them aren't willing to pull on the other end of policy/rights/philosophy which are tension with it.
That's why I say this *will* happen. The only alternative is significant and nuanced new laws accompanied with public oversight. And there's simply no coherent philosophy, party, or leadership that's willing to push a robust public agenda in the United States. Even in the name of privacy.
Tweet, tweet.
Repo mans always intense
Oversight by whom? For what purpose?
Yes, we understand. Bureaucrats and the Police just wanna know.
From your sig: 'What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?'
The "well regulated militia" part. It's wide-open to interpretation.
Thanks to the possible multiple credible interpretations to this the Supreme Court had to step in and lay down its interpretation. Even that interpretation is subject to being overturned by a future Supreme Court that chooses to not follow stare decisis. If it happens, it wouldn't be the first time one Supreme Court has overturned the ruling of a previous set of justices.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
she was canadian
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
just move somewhere mass transportation friendly
but that's already happening: when the real estate market tanked, it was found that the further a house was from mass transportation, the more value it lost
and obama is finally the first president in decades to have the balls and the wisdom to invest in high speed rail, god bless him for that
i think this nations retarded obsession with the automobile and gasoline is finally waning. the hummer finally died last week. hallelujah. there was no greater symbol of the waste arrogance and aggressive isolation of an age i hope is now finally passing. and with that goes the need to secure petroleum production in other parts of the world and all the problems that go with that
hate the us invasion of iraq? hate al qaeda's good funding? stop driving your damn car
you can whine about the world all you want, and how helpless you are about it all, but you're not so helpless. vote with your damn feet, literally. limiting your own contribution to the problems in this world is still well within your control, and driving a car is your contribution to the hellish problems we see in the world today
fuck the age of the automobile. it killed the cores of our cities, it killed our countryside with suburban sprawl and strip malls, it polluted our air, and it isolated us in little metal pods yelling at each other in gridlock on the highway
fuck the automobile, i wish to see the death of the car by my old age. i toast the death of gm, i relish the next oil price shock. death to the automobile age
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Its tracking my license plate information. Who is to say I didn't lend my car to a friend? I have no way to prove it wasn't me, so I get tarred with whatever my friend did while s/he had the car.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The faster the recovery of stolen property (including the lender-owned vehicles driven by deadbeats), the better.
In the typical theft, the shorter times reduces the chance, the car will be destroyed by the either by the thief — and increases the likelihood of his getting caught. In the lender-deadbeat case, it is good as it reduces the lenders' costs, allowing them to give a slightly better deal to the rest of us, who pay on time...
Efficient and effective law-enforcement is a good thing, generally. Certainly so in this case.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How many more examples do people need before realizing that giving the state the power to force people into compulsory handing over of their privacy GUARANTEES that privacy, freedom, and security will be lost. Stop with the collectivist/slave mentality. Read the laws for your state regarding cars, you will be surprised to learned that they only apply to commercial activities, not to individuals traveling from point to point.
What is to stop members of the public from setting up a distributed license-plate tracking system, to say, track politicians and government officials, and make said information public?
If you can't beat em, at least make it so they can't make any money doing it.
In most areas of Australia, your license gets scanned multiple times, and if you violate the speed laws by 1.8mph (as determined by the time elapsed between two known points), or violate the large commercial vehicle maximum hours of operation in a day, you get a nastigram in your mail the next day.
Technically, there is not a good reason why people should drive around with a visible license plate. Within 10 years or so, cars will drive a round with a GPS and some module to transmit their location and identification for whichever purposes the government thinks it is needed (usage fees, maintaining traffic laws, etc.). Others will not be able to read location and identification signals.
I have a friend who can no longer drive for the same reason. Legally he can drive, but he's not so stupid
Is this Your Black Friend we're talking about? Or do you have more than one friend who lets you talk shit about people?
Or in your case, they wouldn't have moved 6 miles away from everything they needed, and you knew it when you moved
That's not what happened, although I don't want to get into it with you here.
You aren't fucked. Michael J Fox is fucked. Christopher Reeve was fucked. Stephen Hawking is fucked.
Michael J Fox, Christopher Reeve, and Stephen Hawking are commuting to work on bikes because they can't drive? Well Christopher Reeve is dead, so I know he's not biking to work.
go visit Europe, or hell, just move to any of the American city with public transportation
If Hell has a good public health care system, sure. But I think I'm going to be here with you.
I thought that use of the NCIC and other terminals required certain parameters to use. So, by definition of the above, a cop could sweep through traffic with an automated scanner and there you go. But I suspect more of the little "cameras" they are placing at traffic intersections will be doing this (if they aren't already). It's the gradual introduction and implementation of technologies that ultimately becomes commonplace, growing beyond it's original purpose and with no real boundaries. I know it sounds very conspiracy-orientated, but this plays right into the "total knowledge" aspect -- and wouldn't it be convenient if these systems were all interconnected so the federal and local gov't's literally track you everywhere, no matter what you are. If you use any time of technology (cell phones, OnStar, ... ) you're already subject to this. OnStar has a hidden function where the satellite can send a signal to your car which will slow the performance down so you can't out-run a cop. And who knows what else is out there. So, we hackers have to find ways to fight back - scramble signals, and make it difficult for them to do what they're trying to do.
So, any ideas about how to legally stop OCR of the plate#?
After a little searching, I found the following in a google cache (this seems like
it is for the stoplight-runner cameras, but still: they've put some thought into this):
* Platefinder - Sophisticated firmware continually searches the camera's field of view for the presence of a license plate.
* Dual Lens Camera - As a license plate is detected, the dual lens camera is triggered to capture both color and infrared images of the vehicle and plate. Infrared cameras are able to see license plates regardless of sun glare, darkness, or other adverse conditions.
* Triple Flash Technology - This patented technology varies the flash, shutter and gain settings of the camera to capture multiple plate images, ensuring the highest quality photo regardless of light or weather conditions. Only the image determined to produce the highest quality read is sent on for processing.
* Optical Character Recognition "Engine" - Unlike some players in the ALPR community, MVTRAC does not use generic OCR engine for all states and regions. MVTRAC uses a customized OCR engine specific to the state or region of interest. MVTRAC OCR engines are very tolerant of skewed and off-axis plate reads, various plate sizes, syntax rules, and designs. The engine reads the captured infrared plate image and converts it to a data file.
* Processors - In addition to housing the patented Platefinder and triple flash technologies, MVTRAC processors perform the OCR translation and can use the captured data in a variety of ways via a MVTRAC software application or third party solution.
* Application Software- Software interfaces, specific to the industry or application, allow the user of the system to easily view and manage the data.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:t9W6EKcsOHgJ:mvtrac.threesphere.com/alpr/overview/+mvtrac+camera&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Tracking cell phones requires access to confidential information available only to the carriers and authorized people hence a reasonable assumption of privacy. A vehicle tag is available to anyone looking at it and therefore no reasonable assumption of privacy. See the difference?
The fact that vehicle tag information is collected in a database and sold does not change the fact that it is not confidential.
I for one welcome our new and interesting voyage into group supervision. If you think about it, our genome is pre-adapted to this sort of group surveillance, according to the cognitive science researchers. Wiki "Dunbar's number" (~150) to start.
Might I suggest that someone take the following idea and run with it? It ought to buy us another few years of invisibility to at least the cameras mounted on overpasses and intersection utility poles.
The idea is to produce polarized filters for use as license plate covers, in such a way that the filter makes it easy to read a plate when you are at the same elevation as the plate, but impossible to read it when you are at an angle more than 20% higher than the plate.
This way, police driving behind you will still be able to read the plate, even if they are several lanes over from you. This will most likely keep them from even noticing the filter exists -- it'll just look like a dirty plate.
However, cameras mounted above traffic won't be able to read the plates until they are quite far away, making it more likely than naught that they won't be able to read them at all (due to obstruction by other cars, distance, and being pointed downward at an angle too steep to make out the plate).
To anyone seeing the car at ground level, the plate would be perfectly readable. To those seeing the plate from above, it would be black.
You could actually take this a step further and put lettering into the filter itself that would also only be visible from above. And at the manufacturing facility you could use a random set of numbers and letters to prevent overhead viewers from easily distinguishing between the letters on the license plates and the letters on the filters. The lettering on the filtering wouldn't show up to viewers on the ground and wouldn't obstruct visibility of the plate from ground-level.
Not sure whether this is a new idea, but if you take it and save the world for a few years, at least let me know. ;-)
therealchewtoy@gmail.com