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New Privacy Threat: Automated Vehicle Occupancy Detection
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is warning against a new potential privacy threat: cameras that look inside cars and try to identify how many people are inside. This technology is a natural combination of simpler ones that have existed for years: basic object recognition software and road-side cameras (red light cameras, speeding cameras, license plate readers — you name it). Of course, we can extrapolate just a bit further, and point out that as soon as the cameras have high enough resolution, they can start running face recognition algorithms on the images, and determine the identities of a vehicle's occupants.
"The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), a government umbrella group that develops transportation and public safety initiatives across the San Diego County region, estimates that 15% of drivers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes aren't supposed to be there. After coming up short with earlier experimental projects, the agency is now testing a brand new technology to crack down on carpool-lane scofflaws on the I-15 freeway. ... In short: the technology is looking at your image, the image of the people you're with, your location, and your license plate. (SANDAG told CBS the systems will not be storing license plate data during the trial phase and the system will, at least for now, automatically redact images of drivers and passengers. Xerox's software, however, allows police the option of using a weaker form of redaction that can be reversed on request.)"
"The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), a government umbrella group that develops transportation and public safety initiatives across the San Diego County region, estimates that 15% of drivers in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes aren't supposed to be there. After coming up short with earlier experimental projects, the agency is now testing a brand new technology to crack down on carpool-lane scofflaws on the I-15 freeway. ... In short: the technology is looking at your image, the image of the people you're with, your location, and your license plate. (SANDAG told CBS the systems will not be storing license plate data during the trial phase and the system will, at least for now, automatically redact images of drivers and passengers. Xerox's software, however, allows police the option of using a weaker form of redaction that can be reversed on request.)"
At first glance, all of these technologies are implemented solely for the purpose for bring in more money to the government.
But I'm sure I'm not being at all cynical enough and probably a bit of Tin Foil Hat theory wouldn't be inappropriate.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...straight rich gits with chauffeurs get priority over everyone else because why, why the fuck, why?
Because they're... not gay?
I recently got a notice from Washington State that my car was in the carpool like without 2 passengers. Another driver reported me. The only problem is that we did have 2 people in the car. One was in the backseat. Any visual identification technique will not see most passengers in the rear seats. The letter threatened that if we were reported 3 times, they would forward our information to the State Patrol.
So now, if a human driving next to the car is too dumb to see passengers in the rear seat, how can a camera see it? Side facing Infrared?
Unfortunately anything beside physically accessing the vehicle to assess if there are 2, 3+ people would be a pretty good 4th Amendment issue. An automated system could not and should not be able to send you an infraction if they are not able to reasonably look into the vehicle from the outside and have 100% accuracy. Only a police officer standing next to your vehicle can do that. And they would need a reasonable suspicion that you were in violation of the law.
The police don't pull over most mini-vans and SUV's with mom's inside because they realize that most of the time they have are kiddle-poolers.
The other way to fix the issue is to change it from 2+ people, to 2+ licensed drivers. The true intent is to remove vehicles from the road, so let's start calling it out and get rid of the kiddie-poolers.
Actually, that's one change I'd like to see--there has to be more than one licensed driver in the vehicle in order to use the carpool lane. You're not really removing a car from the road if the people you're transporting can't drive.