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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.)"
... unless you're doing something wrong?
So it's not really redacted. It's like all those PDF's that redact text with a black box. The original footage still has to be there and the government will keep it.
If you want to enforce HOV lanes, enforce it, have a cop pulling people in the HOV lane over. Automated camera systems are easily defeated in court (they were sitting in the back seat and I have tinted windows, they were giving me a blowjob, reflections, ...) and cost more than hiring actual officers (small (~10 camera) systems are reported to have a final cost in the area of $1-5M/y)
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Beyond the privacy problem, a key issue here is the problem of false positives. The system claims a 96% accuracy in detecting people in passenger seats, which is a huge error rate for sending people fines. A policeman can actually stop you and look in the car, which they have to do before writing a ticket.
The problem is that such fines are expensive to contest (you have to take time off work, show up to court etc). Many people will just pay. This is not a criminal prosecution situation where "presumption of innocence" in the legal sense is relevant, but the principle applies here too: you should hold the government to a high standard of proof here.
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.
Couldn't this system be easily defeated by using an inflatable person or maybe even just a stick with a cut out of Bill Oddie's face glued on the top, resting on your passengers seat?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
is the point of such devices to enforce HOV as a method to encourage more people to carpool in an effort to reduce traffic and pollution or is this just a money grab? if the point is to encourage people to carpool, it will fail as some people simply cannot carpool and the 15% that are scofflaws will simply add to existing traffic congestion which will ultimately cause more pollution. if it's just a money grab, this makes total sense.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is a pathetic excuse for introducing intrusive technology to solve a non-problem. If you think about it for a bit, it would be a simple matter to have a cop start issuing fines until the non-compliance rate drops to an acceptable level. This would cost nothing, as traffic cops generally collect far more in fines than their wages. Instead, our Dear Leaders want to use this situation to direct the indignant fury against cheaters towards promoting an array of face recognition cameras to track your every movement.*
* Of course, for this phase of the plan, they won't publicly acknowledge that the cameras are there to ID you as well as the number of people in your car.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"SANDAG says the current test system is not storing license plate numbers" Well DUH, that's what the NSA's giant datacenter in Utah is for! SANDAG / Xerox may not be storing this, but no one said they aren't just passing along all this data to someone who will. And the FBI claimed Stingray never existed either...
Although I doubt it was done to solve the problem you outline, many HOV lanes are going to 3+ instead of 2+. So the single guy with a driver is no longer clear to go free...
Not that they will care; if you can afford a driver you can afford the toll easily. But at least they will have to pay going forward.
On the other hand, I find going to 3+ to be a burden on families where a wife and husband work, who may well not be able to afford to pay the full HOV fee every day and will no longer be able to use it for free even though they are using one car instead of two.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The cameras are not in the cars, they are roadside cameras like the red-light and speed cameras we already have. They are just adding a face/body detection algorithm to it.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
No on gives a rat's ass about the U.S. Constitution anymore.
What country are they working for?
Not this one.
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I wonder how accurate it is in detecting non-adult profiles. In WA, the HOV lane counts total people, with no requirements on age. This means that a baby sleeping in a carseat counts as a 2nd occupant. I agree with others -- I'm all for HOV lane enforcement but the false positives around automated detection just sound too sketchy.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
to put up Anonymus face masks when driving and put life-size puppets in back seats.
And here I thought they were going to do this to save the helpless children left in cars in extreme heat.
Even "Think of the children" pretenses are dropped now.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
No - just fool the cameras. I bought me a few sex dolls, inflated them and now they are occupying my car. To the 'normal' pedestrian it looks as if the car were fully occupied and I love the faces of the people once they realise what sits in there ...
Works also with motorcycles (sidecars are unbeatable !) - just enjoy the faces of the bystanders when they realize what they are seeing. And it's completely legal ;-) (at least in my corner of the world !)
The sum of intelligence on a planet is constant. Nowadays we have more people. When classic goes away, so do I. Copy
...will it detect when my passenger is a corporation?
I'm sure those cameras will be able to look through windows into cars moving at speed, and detect thing like this...not.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Reminds me of a story about how a guy got pulled over by the cops because he was in the HOV lane...with a blow-up doll in the passenger seat!
Wonder how good this new "solution" would be in detecting that?
Also, for privacy concerns, is it illegal to drive wearing, say, a Nixon rubber face mask? That would probably get you pulled by the cops pretty fast.
It's a good thing the taxpayers are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to solve this incredible problem we all face every day... Oops, there goes another (cancer/malaria/etc.) victim.
A whitelist is less susceptible to abuse than a cop, in that the whitelist is a file that can be examined and is not susceptible to bribery.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Those scofflaws are relieving congestion on the other lanes and improving overall traffic flow. Yes, it would be nice if they were carpooling, but is it worth it to society to make this expense in money, privacy, and more congestion in standard lanes just to enforce carpooling?
Not to store license plate data. You know, just like the TSA promised it wouldn't store pictures it took with it's body scanner.
One potential problem I see (it happens already) is people being ticketed for driving solo, when in fact they have a baby in the car with them. You might not feel they should be in the HOV lane because that baby would never be out driving by itself, therefore they aren't saving any congestion, but it does meet the letter of the law. It also isn't going to be easily picked up on a camera. These people already get pulled over (and released) by cops who can't see the passenger in back. What is going to happen when an automated ticket shows up in the mail? You don't think the system is going to give them the benefit of the doubt, do you? If you do, please pass me some of what you're smoking, Pollyanna.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This is an excellent case for ownership avoidance. If a person has significant motivation to actively protect their anonymity/privacy, I could see how subscribing to a car "service" rather than owning/leasing a specific car, would be attractive. From a service providers perspective, this could be a marketing point as well! As Millennials are the primary demographic that view Edward Snowden as a patriot, I could also see this same demographic being attracted to maintaining of privacy through a car service.
Fill it with explosives, give it a destination.
Such cameras might not be a altogether horrible idea.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
But what I want is for all of those cars full of passengers to get ticketed for using the single occupant lanes!
Have gnu, will travel.