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Public Records Request Returns 4.6M License Plate Scans From Oakland PD
schwit1 points out a report from Ars Technica on how they used a public records request to acquire an entire License Plate Reader dataset from the Oakland Police Department. The dataset includes 4.6 million total reads from 1.1 million unique plates. They built a custom visualization tool to demonstrate how this data could be abused. "For instance, during a meeting with an Oakland city council member, Ars was able to accurately guess the block where the council member lives after less than a minute of research using his license plate data. Similarly, while "working" at an Oakland bar mere blocks from Oakland police headquarters, we ran a plate from a car parked in the bar's driveway through our tool. The plate had been read 48 times over two years in two small clusters: one near the bar and a much larger cluster 24 blocks north in a residential area—likely the driver's home." Though the Oakland PD has periodically deleted data to free up space — the 4.6 million records were strewn across 18 different Excel spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of lines each — there is no formal retention limit.
WTF?
leads to rendition. how long can you hold your breath?
If you have a drivers license, the cops already have your address - they don't need to guess. There are still too many people driving around with expired plates and no insurance.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
How many police officer's personal vehicles show up at crack houses within previous 3 months of being raided?
All this information could also be legally found out by following a person around.
Future data - If I decide you are someone who I do not like, I can simply follow you around and log locations. But if you suspect me, you can change your habits.
Past data - With access to this data, I can see where you've been. Last week, last month, last year
Slide on TFA says that the reads are taken from the IR camera. I have wondered in the past if illuminating the license with IR, or covering the license with a film which has different IR and optical properties might be enough to screw up the OCR. Intersting.
My biggest fear of this technology is that people may be investigated for no reason other than that their car was seen in close proximity to where a crime was committed. Police and district attorneys have been found to fit the evidence to match an individual. This has lead to, at a minimum an extended "interview" at the police station, and at a maximum being put to death. Was your car parked at the entrance to an alley while you picked up a pizza at the same time somebody was raped in the alley? How much money do you have for an attorney?
Just like cameras on police. There needs to be a retention policy and those policies need to be met unless there's a reason to retain them longer (like a court order).
Soon every web cam will front end a plate reader. A web service will exist to consume submittals, and it will crawl the web looking for plates and data like the ad networks do now. A database of all public officials and where they've been tracked on the private plate network will be amusing. It's only a matter of time.
This is bulk surveillance data, you could not follow 1.1 million people around individually, but the police clearly are logging the location and time where they go via automatic number plate readers.
Imagine the sort of data Uber God mode offers. That one 'an employee' said was used to track a journalist critical of them, and he was promptly sacked.
Who is with whom, who is having an affair with who, where their kids go to school, if they see a source of a story, or investigate something, all that location data is there in Ubers hands. Metadata smetadata.
It's probably public information anyways, most homeowner records are.
"four LPR units for 16 months, it had read 793,273 plates and had 2,012 hits—a “hit rate” of 0.2 percent"
Depending on what counts as a hit... (too many traffic tickets count or only get away cars/stolen cars?) this is a really big success.
That comes out to about 377 instances where a car was wanted by the cops found per camera per year. A cop doing that manually would get what? 1 a year?
At that rate I might actually get my stolen car back. Fix the privacy issues so we can roll this out in the hundreds of thousands!
The anti-abortion protestors already do this, they record license plates at abortion clinics and try to follow people. This would give them a big chunk of surveillance data to locate where they live, their job, the kids schools, their friends, their hangouts, their shopping mall,....
They've committed no crime, so why do the police keep innocent peoples data?
Why would you put the private data of innocent people in the hands of every random nutter, some of which have a uniform and a gun?
... to advertisers, insurance companies, NSA ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This technology is already available in the flying world-- where FlightAware makes a plane tracker that publishes flight data from the skies to the public.
Take away lesson is your data will be mined. If you think license plate data is a breach, just wait for ubiquitous facial recognition data going to the public domain.
Brave new world!
You are aware that the addresses of voters are public records readily available.
The amount of data that the police collect is tiny compared to that collected by private business. For $10 you can get access to a database of billions of license plate scans. Making the police data secret does not significantly improve anyone's privacy as long as companies like TLO are around with databases that are orders of magnitude larger. So no downside to releasing the data means it needs to be released for basic accountability purposes.
For about the last 7 years SPD has been parking license plate reading cars around the city and just lets them start scanning everything that passes by. They said it is to look for stolen vehicles, but the records are kept forever even if the plates come up clean.
"For instance, during a meeting with an Oakland city council member, Ars was able to accurately guess the block where the council member lives after less than a minute of research using his license plate data"
Couldn't they just get the address from the same place they got his license plate data?
Yes, that works great in places where
a) Public transit service is good (and actually operates during your working hours or when you're planning to travel)
b) The destination is located near enough to home to allow for walking
c) Ditto [b] for biking, and isn't too steep
d) You live somewhere without winter, otherwise scratch (b) and (c) once it snows.
Around here, if you don't have a vehicle, you've got a 3rd-class lifestyle. Grocery trips take multiple transfers and over an hour travel instead of 10 minutes (and try carrying a dozen bags of groceries on the bus). You can't take your dog to the vet because no pets on transit. And a foot or more of snow in the winter isn't very conducive to walking, let alone biking.