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Public Records Request Returns 4.6M License Plate Scans From Oakland PD

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-know-where-you-drove-last-summer dept.

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.

2 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Ubiquity is unavoidable by bhlowe · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Even if the police make this data private, the general population will jump in to make this (and most) data such as this freely available. A small box located near your mailbox will be able to record every car that drives by and capture video of anyone walking by.

    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!

  2. Re:Sort of redundant by joe_frisch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The risk of large scale surveillance is that it can generate data sets that can be mined for information. Tracking can show networks of friends, attendance at political rallies, books read, movies watched, foods and alcohol consumed. Does this pattern match for a potential terrorist - can't prove anything, but maybe you shouldn't keep your job at Lockheed, or should get extra screening at the airport? Did you watch "little miss sunshine" too many times for your demographic - could mean you are a pedophile - maybe you shouldn't have a job as a school teacher - think of the children.

    Which political information should you see? Candidates can target their adds to YOU specifically. Same for news, and advertising.

    Maybe you don't get enough sleep, or are found to meet women ( or other men) at bars and take them home. Sounds like "statistically" you might be a health risk and your insurance rates will go up.

    Large scale tracking, data collection and analysis allow for statistical pattern matches. The public might be happy that a new system has a only 1% failure rate, and only a 10% false positive rate for recognizing people who are a danger to children - unless you are in that 10%