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Global Mall Operator Starts Reading License Plates
First time accepted submitter skegg writes "Westfield Group, one of the largest shopping centre (mall) operators in the world, has launched a find-my-car iPhone app. The system uses a series of license plate reading cameras dotted throughout their multi-level car parks. Westfield said police could also use it to find stolen or unregistered vehicles. (Hello, slippery slope.) Initially launched in just one Sydney centre, it will be rolled-out to others if the trial is successful."
How is this a slippery slope? The cars are parked in a public place, with license plates easily viewable. There is no expectation of privacy in this case.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Yet another reason to stay away from the mall... lol
before this type of data is used in a divorce proceeding, e.g. litigant's car was placed at a nightclub, strip club or casino on the following dates
Westfield said police could also use it to find stolen or unregistered vehicles. In other news those cameras have appeared bloody everywhere, and their servers have just been hacked by everyone ever. Problem? [insert troll-face here, etc]
My secret private license plate information that is on the front and back of my car, and which it is illegal to obfuscate, conceal, or otherwise make harder to read.
And they're going to use CAMERAS to look for them! Why next they'll have satellites keeping an eye on the weather!
1. At least remember what vague part of the lot you parked in. That will help.
2. (to actually be done before step 1) Purchase and place one of those antenna ball things, a fairly uncommon one in a striking color (yellow, orange, or neon pink all work well), and look for that.
Assuming you didn't park next to a van or an H2, that thing should stick out like a sore thumb.
My wife's old car had a bright yellow winnie-the-pooh antenna ball and that thing was always easy to spot no matter how crowded the lot.
Westfield also operates dozens of malls in the US and a number in New Zealand as well. See this list on wikipedia.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
While the iDevice app maybe new, the camera-in-car-park scenario has been operating in at least one place that I know (and use) quite frequently; Brisbane Airport.
When you drive in, it images and OCRs your plate at the boom-gate, printing your rego on the ticket. Each car park has a camera pointed at it with a large multi colour light that reads - Red; park occupied, Green; park vacant, and Blue; park about to be vacated. When you pay for/validate your ticket, the light above your car goes from red to blue, and as soon as you pull out, it flicks to green.
I'm all for this tech, it makes park hunting so much easier, plus you would be amazed at the number of stolen cars that are stolen for the express purpose of the criminal driving it to their destination (such as the airport or shopping centre) with no intention of doing anything with the car other than avoiding a taxi fare. Thousands of stolen cars are recovered from parking lots each year, undamaged and usually, unlocked!
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
I'm thinking if you're too irresponsible to remember where you left one of your most valuable possessions that you are also too irresponsible to be trusted with the use of that possession.
A follow up app was launched called "Find My Cheating Wife". The new app was soon followed with "Find My Drunken Husband". These $1 apps were soon followed with the slightly more expensive "Block My Souse's App". A real bargain at a $1,000.
How about an expectation of Mind Your Own Business? Does that work for you?
I didn't read the article, but here's my opinion anyway. It's only a slippery slope if they keep a record after the car has left. If I could enter and leave without any lasting record, I'm cool with it. You could still check for stolen cars that are currently parked there. Or if there was a list of stolen cars, and one showed up, alert the police. That'd be cool.
But if someone could plug in my license plate and see the last time I was there, that's not cool.
Until the fools begins switching license plates. When was the last time you checked to see if your license plate was still YOUR license plate?
It's an EXTREMELY slippery slope. Once the commercial vendor starts collecting this data under the guise of "something useful", it will undoubtedly be perverted into other uses, most invasive by the Government, lawyers on fishing expeditions, etc.
Just like those inane "discount cards" in grocery stores and ezPass/iPass tollway transponders have been perverted from their original uses.
Any mall that implements this asinine invasion of my privacy doesn't get any of my business. I'll just order MORE from online sources. If they all implement something in my area, I'll walk.
Say NO to this. Whack this camel's nose so it doesn't wreck the tent...
I don't understand why more parking lots aren't setup with a decent grid system and signage. If you can't remember or be bothered to know the few characters needed to describe the location of your car, you deserve to be lost. I think the problem is too many people rely on landmarks, which change frequently in a parking lot (because they're mostly cars), and leave it to a retail industry to overthink a problem with an elaborate, unnecessary solution. Sure, convenience factor, but still, as the summary put it, it's a slippery slope.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Use the app at the touch of your fingertips to see if your neighbor is out and take what you want!
As I read it the mall folks have no access to owner data. This makes the data little different than tracking make/model/color/year. My question is how long do they keep the tag data?
Most airports have these systems on trucks and drive thru their lots, as they are almost always a County agency there is nothing stoppin them from working with the sheriff to do the same thing. They currently do this to help you find your car nd look for abandoned vehicles.
Many state agencies are adding this system to their State Highway patrols to scan plates as they drive and look for BOLO's and Reg Issues.
While everyone goes on about loss of privacy, the biggest problem I see is this:
If you cannot generally remember where you put your car, how are you going to remember the random cryptic string of digits that is your license plate to look up your car on this system?
For better or worse, it does seem like the system may be much more helpful to police than visitors.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We hide grandpa's Cadillac for a reason.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm actually surprised there is no android/iphone app that lets you put your phone on the dash and it snaps license plates as you drive. Why should big brother be in the hands of big brother? Let's crowdsource it and figure out where all federal plates, state plates, police, etc are on a regular basis. Altho it would be a stalker's dream app but if the feds are watching us, let's watch back.
I hope they follow local laws. They are not in Sweden as far as I know but because of our history of registering a lot about people we have strikt laws about what you may register and this is not legal here.
Since we are talking iPhones here, I think they all have gps's in them.
You could have an app that records where you left your car at. Either by pressing a button that says something like "Remember this location", so later, you can use the same app to find your way back to that location.
For the lazy, you could have it keep track of where you are, and where you been at all times, so you can retrace your steps even easier.
but no, the best solution is probably spending billions of dollars on special license plate reading cameras and whatever you use to control them. After all, no one would abuse such power.
Be seeing you...
sacrifice for convenience.
Oh, wait, people gave up the 4th amendment at airports and it's now much less convenient.
Curious creatures people are.
Absolute statements are never true
The real potential for abuse is the same as with online stores -- tweaking prices depending on customer's expected willingness to pay them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
People didn't give that up. Congress gave it up for us, and people vote based on other issues.
There is no slippery slope here. Mall parking lots are already scoured over by police looking for expired tags and other ticket-able offences.
Once again nerds go off the libertarian deep end.
Number plate reading cameras in public car parks have been around in the UK for a number of years and the government hands for even longer. Any time spent in London your vehicle will be scanned both publicly and privately. A visit to almost any airport in the UK will result in that and Heathrow Airport has had the "find my car" stuff for quite a while.
If it is a slippery slope, it is one that is already been in the wild for a long long time. Time to go tilt at some other windmills.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Which liberty is being sacrificed in this particular case?
Each time you let a corporation or the government have information about what you do or where you go, you're building the fascist society that you so vehemently deny is coming.
You may have no problem today with having someone else know that you parked in spot a-33 at the mall at 4:33, then you bought dinner for two at the Cheesecake Factory (per your debit / credit) card, then left the parking lot at 5.24. You arrived at the No-tell-hotel at 6:12 and checked into room 163 with your friend and spent 1.2 hours there.
Here's the thing that you never consider: the only reason that law enforcement collects information is to further an investigation. If some hooker bought it at the No-tell-hotel at 6:30, you'll be one of the prime suspects. If someone who stayed there on that day is busted for possession, they'll be coming to ask you a few questions.
This stuff doesn't make the law enforcement people smarter, it just makes them lazier. They can look at all of the nifty data and find someone to pin the crime on without ever setting their donut down.
Sure, quote that line about "if you've done nothing wrong then you've got nothing to worry about". And then consider that what you think is wrong and what someone else thinks is wrong (MADD for example) are two very different things. Maybe your parking data will show up in a criminal trial; maybe it'll show up in your divorce proceedings. But rest assured, it'll never show up in any place where it does YOU any good.
Scanning the license plates isn't needed.The iPhone already knows your location so just with one click you should be able to save your car location.
This license plates scanning idea is pure for data mining.
I'm not claiming there's no legitimate reason for the public to want to track a vehicle.... but honestly, that's probably one of the best (only?) really solid arguments for demanding license plates on them. Without plates as unique identifiers, it's difficult to determine exactly which vehicle was used in a crime committed against you. If you say "A guy driving a late model blue Ford truck ran me off the road and drove off!" or what-not, that's not really good enough. And obviously, the VIN number isn't practical for this purpose either.
But yes, I *do* consider my car a personal possession. It certainly isn't public or state property! The only reason government really has any special reason to get involved with aspects of my vehicle ownership at all is because they built and maintain the road infrastructure most of us (including me) operate our vehicles on. Other than that, they should treat it like any other purchase I make.... Collect the same sales tax as they would any other time, but leave it alone after that.
The problems I have with what Westfield is doing aren't necessarily legal in nature. I think if they own the cameras and computers and they operate them on their own private property, plus they inform customers that they're in place? They're legally in the clear. But clearly, they're using technology that was never even considered as a possibility when license plates were first conceived -- and it's an implementation that some customers may not be comfortable with. I'd certainly think twice about parking in their garage if they start this at my local Westfield shopping plazas. The fact that it conveniently helps me locate my car is a small benefit, but as others have pointed out? There's a lot of potential for this information to be logged and cross-analyzed to provide marketing information I didn't agree to or get fairly compensated for providing.
Let me ask you this: How would you feel if every time you drove into a mall, some guy appeared with a clipboard and jotted down info including exactly where you parked in relation to their store entrances, the time/date you parked, and the type of vehicle you drove ... and THEN appeared again as you were leaving to note what you were carrying to your vehicle, how long you took to load it up and leave the parking space, and again, a time/date stamp of exactly when that was? This is just an automated version of the same, really (with some of the details only extractable if they want to review the camera footage).
The UK has an extensive automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) CCTV network. Police and security services use it to track UK vehicle movements in real time. The resulting data are stored for 5 years in the National ANPR Data Centre to be analyzed for intelligence and to be used as evidence.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK
The United Kingdom: Orwell got the year wrong.
If the world of crime were static and unchanging, this would be a damning indictment of the misuse of modern technology. But it's not; criminals use new technology to become more efficient at committing crime.
To complain about the police using new technology to keep pace with criminals seems, to me, a far more dangerous slippery slope.
you can do anything in the name of the children
keep the populace fearful of a common enemy and they will do your bidding to be safe
etc etc
be a good place to put a honeypot.
I don't mind the owner of the mall knowing my license plate and storing those details - and begrudgingly i will allow video inspection in the interest of lower prices - but dissemination license plate to location data on the general public is going one step way too far. Who knows who can be out there using that information... housebreakers? ex girlfriends?
is to identify times of entry/exit and thus be able to "fine" vehicles that overstay arbitrarily imposed parking limits. I don't know about the US, but in the UK its common to find that Supermarkets/Shopping Centres (aka malls) farm out their car parks to organisations like Parking Eye who are able to retrieve ownership details from the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Authority and thus send threatening notices, that look remarkably like police penalty charge notices, demanding payment for the car owners "parking offence".
The iPhone app is just a way to divert attention from the real revenue-raising purpose of mall NPR cameras.
Cut the bull please.
Anyone have any sourcecode?
As someone who spends more than a few hours a week at Westfield's Bondi Junction centre, I can tell you more about it.
1) The technology is from this company and the technology is already in use (in varying forms) at US malls. It's primary purpose is to help people find a parking spot quicker and for that it works *very* well.
2) A downside of the system is that it doesn't seem to record imagery from all the cameras, besides the number-plate data. A friend had her car damaged in the parking lot and was unable to find any camera footage to assist.
3) Yes, it helps you find your car (or anyone else's).
4) It also stops people taking advantage of the free 2 hour parking by exiting the carpark and re-entering. Although they have not enabled this yet, it's expected that the second time you drive in after expending your free 2 hour ration, you'll be charged for time on-site.
My biggest fear about ANPR cameras, is when local government start using it for parking enforcement and riots break out which will make the LA and London riots look like a playground scuffle. The companies who sell this stuff will have the blood of parking officers on their hands...
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
License plate reading cameras, facial recognition and other tracking devices are going to happen, they will be everywhere. Well they pretty much are everywhere already.
But the sooner we get this 'oh my privacy' all over and done with, the sooner we'll learn to live with it.
Never happened. True story.
How do they define a successful trial - one where no one litigates?
It surprises me that nobody has pointed out yet that there are dozens of smartphone apps already that do exactly this- help you find back your car.
What's more, none of the "find my carr" apps are mall-dependent app nor require the mall to set up an array of cameras, and thus they're vastly superior to the system proposed by the Westfield group. Logically, if the Westfield group claim they aren't aware of those alternative apps, they've either been living under a rock or are lying, which in turn implies ulterior motives (said "slippery slope"). My money is on the latter.
Aren't shopping malls going the way of the dinosaur? Just shop online and fuck paying the extra costs and dealing with the 1984-esque feel of going to the mall.
Two years ago, they were tracking what stores you were in via your phone.
Suppose that technology has dried up and blown away in the meantime due to the deafening cry of the outraged shoppers?
"Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." -- Calvin
because they are just scanning plates in the parking lot and offering an app to locate your vehicle how do they know it's your vehicle you are trying to locate. couldn't this be misused by stalkers and criminals as well as the police?
The real problem is that you have thieves in your area.
Fix your country: taxes should be used by the state to share money between people. Less poor vs. rich means less thieves.
The real problem is that there are thieves in the area.
Fix the country: taxes should be used by the state to share money between people. Less poor vs. rich means less thieves.
The legal justification for a license plate and registration tags is to show that you've paid taxes on your car, and you're not allowed to drive on the street in the state where you live unless you've paid the tax. Some states have expanded that justification to do things like annual safety inspection or air pollution inspection. Of course, once you've got license plates on the car, the police find them useful for all kinds of other things.
Parking cars on the street without current registration is no different legally from driving them on the street, just easier to catch. Parking on private property doesn't usually require your car to be licensed, though some jurisdictions have anti-blight or anti-redneck laws that ban parking unlicensed cars on your lawn, but parking them inside buildings is fine (assuming your building isn't also condemned by anti-blight laws.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No - but you can be booked for actually covering your plates on public roads. So if you've got a motorized gizmo that raises or lowers a cover, and you remember to uncover before you go out on the street, you're fine. The laws that apply when you're on Westfield's private property are just trespassing laws, so if Westfield feels paranoid about it and wants to kick your Anonymous Coward car out of their parking lot, they're fine.
The slippery slope in the US was airport parking lots. Some years before 9/11, pretty much all the parking lots at major US airports started putting license plate cameras at the entrance, and wouldn't raise the entrance gate unless they could see your plate. The lots were concessions operated by contractors, not by the government, so you couldn't complain about illegal surveillance, but obviously they were feeding that data to the cops, who could use it to track who's at what airport and when. And the contractors contended that they were doing it to prevent fraud (so if you parked there for a month, you couldn't walk up to the gate the day you left, press the button and get a new ticket, and pay for an hour's parking, which might be mostly bogus compared to the cost of the enforcement system but probably did happen on occasion.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's not just a UK thing - there are systems marketed to police in the US that you can mount on a car and read the license plates of all the parked cars you drive by, and by now they might even be able to read them on moving cars. Not surprisingly, the target market is parking enforcement - a city might not be able to justify buying them for surveillance purposes (unless they can scam some Homeland Security budget), but for parking ticket revenue generation, they're pretty much self-funding. And license plate reading has been around for a long time for catching tollbooth evaders, but all that needs is good image capture, and you can have humans read it.
Back in the 90s, San Francisco was tearing down the old Central Freeway because of earthquake damage, and a month before that they started tracking license plates of cars that used the freeway. They farmed out the job of reading the license plates to cheap prison labor, and sent everybody a postcard saying "Next month we're tearing down the freeway, please find yourself a different route to work." Worked fine. It didn't have to be real-time, and it didn't have to be close to 100% accurate or complete - it kept most of the regular commuters out of the area, and the local surface streets could cope with the traffic load from the small fraction of people who didn't know about it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That was chatswood. We used to wonder if the reason your license plate appeared on your thermal-print ticket was to stop you moving your car in/out of the car-park to reset after the 2 free hours. Then the license plate numbers dissappeared off the tickets. Never got the "whaffor?".
Also it used to like license plates from other states.
You're asking how can you remember something that's always constant when you occasionally forget something that's always variable?
The thing that's variable is something you just a few hours ago.
The thing that's "constant" is something you have to know (for most people) every few years. You don't even need to know it for your registration, you just mall that in... the only time I need to know my license plate number is at hotels. Often I come up with the license plate for my previous car first, because it has been so long since I've had to remember a license plate number.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Westfields is also the operator of the World trade centre mall in New York
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mall_at_the_World_Trade_Center
I'd rather have them know a stolen truck is being driven up into their carpark, * before * it blows up. better than having police review security camera footage after the fact.