San Jose May Put License Plate Scanners On Garbage Trucks

An anonymous reader writes: It's bad enough that some places have outfitted their police vehicles with automated license plate scanners, but now the city of San Jose may take it one step further. They're considering a proposal to install plate readers on their fleet of garbage trucks. This would give them the ability to blanket virtually every street in the city with scans once a week. San Jose officials made this proposal ostensibly to fight car theft, but privacy activists have been quick to point out the unintended consequences. ACLU attorney Chris Conley said, "If it's collected repeatedly over a long period of time, it can reveal intimate data about you like attending a religious service or a gay bar. People have a right to live their lives without constantly being monitored by the government." City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."

Comments

To Fight Car Theft

[Mr D from 63]

So, if fighting car theft is the reason, will they agree up front to abandon the effort if a significant drop in car theft is not realized? I betcha not.

Re:To Fight Car Theft

[Anonymous Coward]

It will only be a matter of time before San Jose recognizes the revenue stream they could generate by selling this data.

Re:To Fight Car Theft

[Damarkus13]

If car theft is the issue they don't even need to collect any data. Upload a list of license plates of stolen vehicles to the units in the morning, before they roll out. Have the unit record location data ONLY when it finds a plate on that list.

They won't do this.

Police state San Jose

[serano]

San Jose: just because technology gives you the ability to do something doesn't mean you have to do it.

Re:Police state San Jose

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Indeed. I read this

"This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."

and my immediate reaction was "then perhaps you should be".

You aren't expecting not to have your car seen by someone passing in the street who wouldn't give it a second glance or remember it 10 seconds later. However, that's a totally different thing to having its identity and location digitally scanned, recorded indefinitely, and searchable in combination with arbitrary other data sources, giving rise to the reasonable privacy concerns mentioned in TFS and many more.

Re:Police state San Jose

[TWX]

If the trucks would discard all data as they scan that doesn't match an on-board stolen vehicle database I might agree with you.

Re:Police state San Jose

[bleh-of-the-huns]

It is invasive, because it allows the wholesale collection of information on people without any effort, and the create a massive database on every vehicle owners movements.

I'd be fine if they read the plates, checked whether or not it is stolen, and then dumps the data, never storing it, but we know this won't happen. They will keep the data for years. And my faith in any police force of government body has been shaken enough that I no longer trust them, and the data will ultimately be abused by someone, whether it's an officer checking up on their spouse, or a politician looking for dirt on their opponent.

No, if they want to use the garbage collection resources as a means to read plates, then have the garbage men write every plate down on paper, or manually type it into the computer. Because the city is right, on public streets there is no expectation of privacy. Back in the day, law enforcement had to do the legwork by hand, let that continue.

Re: Police state San Jose

[Anonymous Coward]

This. The whole 'no expectation of privacy' argument is and always has been stupid, and this councilman is a moron for saying it.

I don't expect to be invisible on a public street. I do expect that unless I do something memorable that people who observe me aren't going to recall seeing me or do anything anything all concerning their observation of me hours, days, months, or years later.

This business is completely different and totally beyond what I expect when out and about.

Re: Police state San Jose

[bondsbw]

Indeed. The issue here isn't "right to privacy", it's "right to be forgotten".

Re: Police state San Jose

[chuckugly]

People should stop calling it privacy and call it what it is - a reasonable expectation of anonymity. There is a difference but until we could store things accurately and forever in a searchable form a degree of anonymity was never a concern, it just happened as a matter of course.

Of course in smaller communities there is very little anonymity, and I suppose that's the next discussion. What is reasonable to demand as far as a sense of being anonymous?

Google Maps

[brunes69]

City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."

This argument did not work for Google Maps, who have been forced by various state and municipal governments to blur the license plates and faces of people captured.

But I guess they aren't the government... if the government does it, it's fine.. (???)

Time for shoe-on-the-other-foot tactics.

[geekmux]

"...City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: "This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."

Really Johnny?

So you won't mind if I just set up this webcam on the public street outside of your home and feed that stream to the internet, right?

Or perhaps we'll find some volunteers to follow you and your family around day and night as you drive around. That won't seem creepy or invasive at all, I'm sure. And after all, we're just driving around on public streets, right?

Sometimes I really wonder what the hell it would take to get these morons to wake about privacy and how it feels to be monitored day and night.

Privacy isn't boolean

[SecurityGuy]

"This is a public street. You're not expecting privacy on a public street."

This is only partially true. I'm not expecting that no one in the world will see my car. I am expecting that it's rather unlikely that if I park on a random street for a couple hours, anyone I know will see and notice my car and actually realize it's mine.

I very much DO expect the level of privacy that excludes someone frequently taking note of the exact location of my car. If John Q. Public were doing that, I'd be very put off. I might even consider it stalking. In no sane world do we then say, "Well, it's fine if it's the government and they're stalking EVERYONE."

Yes, Mr. Khamis, I do expect that level of privacy, and it's not for you to decide what the public gets to expect. Your job is to do what we want, not the other way around.

Already being done commercially ...

[perpenso]

Car repo and bail bondsmen have been doing license plate scanning and logging for a while. Going far beyond what the garbage trucks will do. For example the repo/bond guys in addition to logging while driving down the street they also cruise parking lots of grocery stores, walmart, etc to log plates. There is a huge national database of these logs. Many police departments actually subscribe to this database.

False positives

[bluefoxlucid]

The real problem isn't the public nature of your data; it's the private nature of aggregate data.

Because you carry out your activities in public, any individual who legitimately wants information about you can, without violating any laws, personally keep track of your public activities. Without publication or any direct action, the person is not harassing you or whatnot. The things you do are completely public and not subject to privacy protections.

That, of course, implies someone is interested in you, personally, in the first place.

With aggregate data, we can put together lists of all people whose public functions follow a certain pattern. This, then, draws our attention to those people.

Most people don't realize the very criminal nature of human existence. A lot of folks have... mischief in their histories. Hanging in parks at night, casual adultery, illegal gambling between friends... hell, there's estimates that some 40%-70% of 20-year-olds have hooked up with underaged teens. These are all things that can put you in jail, and may or may not distress people in your community--some more than others, some not at all (nobody cares about your poker games in your basement with your drinking buddies). As it stands, these activities aren't actually harmful to society, or distressing at large.

That's why we have strict, constitutional controls for searches and seizure: if your criminal activities aren't drawing any attention, your criminal activities aren't harmful to society. The police rifling through your belongings and arresting you on bureaucratic technicalities *would* harm society at large, creating a constant state of paranoia and resentment among the population, along with costly economic and social disruption.

Aggregate public data collection and profiling similarly draws attention to people's behaviors, focusing legal scrutiny where it does not necessarily do the most good. As this scrutiny broadens, it necessarily dilutes the attention of legal enforcement from the important criminal activities which actually harm society. Persons whose activities are of no consequence are more frequently investigated and arrested, while persons whose quiet activities invoke a greater injury to their peers enjoy reduced law enforcement attention and a consequential lower risk for expanding their operations even further. Such aggregation could, as consequence, allow petty criminals to build and operate more substantial criminal networks with even less likelihood of police detection.

Many forget the police are not law enforcement officers, but peace officers. Their job is to keep the peace; they are not lawyers and not expected to know the law. This is because police detect crime by detecting its effects: injury, death, property loss, and, above all, distress among the population. This fits well with the explicit prohibition on police actively looking for crimes without first having a crime brought to their attention by the public nature of its activities.

Broad data collection and aggregation changes the public nature of people's activities. It distorts this function, leading to false positives and arrests of harmless members of society.