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A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry

146 points by samkline 13y ago

zacinbusiness 13y ago
This is quite interesting. On the one hand, I do understand that autoloans are very easy to default on. So there should be some method for loan companies to get these vehicles back. However, I also think that loan companies should more carefully screen their applicants. Of course, that would mean that loan companies make less money on loans and fees, and that they lose money on reselling cars that are already partially paid for. So I'm conflicted. But I don't think that the mass collection of data is the way to go, ever. And I wonder about the legality of putting up a "fuzzy" license plate. Say if your plate number is 123-AB12G or whatever, you simply write on a piece of cardboard "One Two Three Dash Aye BEE One Two Gee." I'm sure there's legislation against that, though.
- talmand 13y ago
  If the loans are so easy to default on, maybe they should rethink the current practices instead of considering a system that's so easily abused to invade people's privacy?
  - zacinbusiness 13y ago
    I agree 100%. Loan recovery people are usually pretty vicious, so this sort of thing doesn't surprise me too much.
- landryraccoon 13y ago
  Strict screening will make it harder for the poor, who have poor credit, to buy a car. Tracking vehicles will make lenders less paranoid about lending, which will enable less wealthy households to lend. IMO if you're wealthy ( like the vast majority of the readers of HN ) you should be able to opt out of tracking for an additional financing feel whereas the poor should still be able to voluntarily subject themselves to tracking in exchange for a more favorable rate. Personally I wouldn't care if the bank is tracking my car while it's not paid off, so I'd go for the lower rate anyway.
  - zacinbusiness 13y ago
    I can see a sort of opt-in thing working. And that would be better than just sending out camera equipped cars to scan all the vehicles. But in the same way that I would agree to a tracking system I would also agree to an automatic debit from my account each month. At least that way there's no location data for the government to subpoena.
  - Wistar 13y ago
    The "Buy Here Pay Here" car sales lots that sell primarily to low-income folks often install tracking equipment in the vehicles they sell as a part of the deal. Ken Bensinger's 2011 LA Times series about the practices of Buy-Here-Pay-Here car sales businesses: "A vicious cycle in the used-car business" http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/30/business/la-fi-buy-here-pay-here-part1-storyb http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/30/business/la-fi-buy-h... Fairly depressing.
    - GFischer 13y ago
      To me, used to the abusive interest rates here in Uruguay, 20% sounds really good. And while the tactic they used to repossess the car was pretty shady, they were in their right. And 25% default rate is tough. It's depressing, but the alternative would be leaving people with no financing options. A NGO or maybe a startup that helped people balance their economies would be doing a lot of help, in the U.S. and everywhere. I've read about some that try to disrupt lenders, including a Y Combinator backed one (LendUp). http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/lendup-raises-14m-from-google-ventures-data-collective-to-disrupt-payday-lending/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/lendup-raises-14m-from-goog...
evan_ 13y ago
Terrifying startup prospect: Imagine a small dashcam-like consumer device that was able to perform the same type of license plate recognition coupled with GPS location. A data collection company could provide these devices for free or at a low cost to anyone, and then pay drivers for every license plate scan their box sends in. Obvious downfall: someone will figure out how to spoof a GPS signal and randomly generate license plate images on a computer monitor and make a bunch of money for uploading junk data.
- smackay 13y ago
  I'd pay good money to track down the aggressive clowns I meet on the highway or those who came close to killing me on a pedestrian crossing. The long arm of ... revenge.
  - diydsp 13y ago
    ...and someone else would pay good money to a clown to put on a fake license plate cover of their business rival and commit aggressive acts, so vigilantes and a mob would go after them. We need time-varying crypto license plates. apparently.
- berberous 13y ago
  You realize that's essentially what's already happening the article, right? Large databases companies like DRN are providing free or low cost ALPRs to repo men who submit a minimum number of records per month. I'm not sure consummerizing it makes it much more terrifying, given the tremendous size these databases have already achieved.
  - evan_ 13y ago
    At a certain density of plate scanning devices, the plate tracking becomes real time.
- DanAndersen 13y ago
  When Google Glass first was announced, I imagined a future where it would become more common to rent out access to one's vision. I imagined a service, called BuyMyEyes, that would set up per-minute or per-user fees that sellers could use to offer access to their line of sight to interested viewers. Then there could be a chatbox where the viewers input what the "eyes" should go look at next. In such a world, I could imagine a system where police departments send a notification: "The person 50 feet in from of you is a potential person of interest in an investigation. Keep him in your line of sight for 10 minutes and win a free iPad!"
sbarre 13y ago
I think the article nails it on the head when it talks about technology getting ahead of social/legal controls. I'm sure when license plates were devised, no one thought ahead to the day a single unregulated for-profit company could automate the scanning and geolocation of many millions of vehicles a year.
- rmc 13y ago
  There are legal controls in some places. The EU has had Data Protection law since 1995. There was a lot of history in Europe of organisations (usually countries) collecting massive amounts of data on people.
r0h1n 13y ago
I'm curious - how exactly would one refute the following argument put forth by data brokers and repo agents? > But Digital Recognition and other so-called “data brokers” who collect plate scans are fighting Hecht’s bill, arguing that repo agents are not invading privacy when they scan a license plate, which is available for all to see. The data brokers do not disclose the owner of the plates, they point out, though customers such as banks, insurers, and private investigators have ready access to that information.
- iamsalman 13y ago
  Come to think of it -- humans can't memorize all the number plates they see. Machines can. It's the "recording" of these images (though there for everyone to see) which takes us into the gray area.
  - chiph 13y ago
    In addition, the problem most people don't recognize with this, is the database keeps a history of where the car has been seen. This history is ripe data for divorce attorneys who can use it to show that assignations at motels took place. Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems - I had a neighbor who split up because the Google car photographed a motorcycle in their driveway that wasn't the husbands.
    - mseebach 13y ago
      > Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems No, affairs can cause marital problems. Technology just makes it easier to get caught This is not a vindication of the technology in question, but it can't be blamed for everything. I can't help but think that cheating business travellers had it a lot easier before the advent of ubiquitous, near-free mobile long distance telephony made it easier for spouses to keep tabs on the travelling partner. That doesn't make telephony a cause of marital problems.
      - TeMPOraL 13y ago
iamsalman 13y ago
Eventually, our new found love for collecting lots and lots of data about everyone and everything would come back to haunt us, making some billionaires and a vast majority living under surveillance. Sketchy but probable.
darksim905 13y ago
Where exactly do they get their scanner tools from? I always thought these were police/3 letter agency only?
- walid 13y ago
  I read a half of the article and it doesn't seem to mention where from, but all you need is a camera with image recognition. Number plates are much easier to spot than faces since they are very uniform and flat and would only be translated in an image.
- imroot 13y ago
  I've seen these cars in the Cincinnati area. They're using the same technology (Cameras, at least) that the Law Enforcement folks (Ohio State Highway Patrol) are using, but on a 4 year old Honda Civic versus a Crown Vic/Dodge Charger/Chevy Impala.
- weavie 13y ago
  The article says they cost 10,000-17,000 which surprises me. Surely an iPhone would be enough technology for this?
  - rmc 13y ago
    In the same way an iphone can be good enough for your wedding photos? These are high quality cameras, that have to work in large range of weather and lighting conditions. This cost might also include the software to OCR and store the details.
    - hengheng 13y ago
      Parent's point was valid though, I can't imagine these devices to cost more than $170 in a couple of years, making this discussion quite relevant.
      - RyJones 13y ago
        Until the cost of grinding glass comes way down, this won't be true.
crypt1d 13y ago
I really, really want to say that I think this technology is a bad idea. But I don't. I don't think that the technology is the problem here, as Digital Recognition said they are not _technically_ invading privacy since the license plates are available for everyone to see. And if you outlaw it, whats stopping a few crooks organizing their own underground data collection and selling the stuff on a black market? Rather, I'd prefer to see a different way of "licensing" cars. Maybe some kind of RFID chip that can only be read by law enforcement? I know its quite unlikely something like this will ever happen, but anyway.
- hrjet 13y ago
  > I'd prefer to see a different way of "licensing" cars. How about an LCD screen that shows a captcha image of the license number? The captcha image can be regenerated after a set interval, for example, a day. Edit: This would have the benefit that humans can still read it, but making it difficult for OCR.
  - talmand 13y ago
    Well, consider that a government agency would still have to keep a database of what captcha tags were assigned to you on any given day at any given time, then it wouldn't be difficult to tie the two together. At that point you don't need to decipher the captcha, just compare pixels.
  - gnerd 13y ago
    Weren't modern license plates made the way they are to aid automatic (or human) detection? For instance, traffic cameras, automated scanning from traffic police to make sure your car is insured or even your elderly neighbour writing down a license plate late at night after seeing a car speed away from a possible hit-and-run.
ctdonath 13y ago
Is this discussion any different than the one we had a couple decades ago when credit/debit cards went from occasional use to primary currency? There was huge outcry about how everyone would be tracked, how every purchase you made could be aggregated and monitored and tracked and sold and leveraged, how personal problems could arise when a spouse or lawyer saw inappropriate purchases on bank card records, etc etc. Today, we still acknowledge those problems - while using those cards, having just given in to the sheer convenience of its regardless of the data mining that occurs. I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data.
- talmand 13y ago
  While true, I would imagine it is much easier for a good number of people to go cash only to avoid that, as opposed to never driving a car again. Then when face recognition kicks in, never going out in public. Might be an opportunity in there somewhere for selling comfortable face masks.
  - ryusage 13y ago
    I'm curious when we'll start seeing people dressing like this: http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Hopefully never; discounting war and other emergencies, it's a waste of material. The moment people wearing such things become an issue, the government or a company will get few undergrads to fix the image recognition algorithm and boom, all the protection is gone in the blink of an updating flash memory.
- cinquemb 13y ago
  >I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data. I've thought about this a lot (because my startup wants to move into this space in a year or so, depends on the progression of wearables like glass) and have drawn the conclusion that the reason the facebooks and googles of the world while being technically capable of executing such an idea, they might see as even trying to do such (based on them basically creating walled gardens around information of which one needs to create an identity to access) would amount to a public flogging of them and maybe no clear way to monetize such capabilities now (just look at foursquare stumbling along trying to do such, and that's without facial recog). But as you note, the technology is here, it's only a matter of time before someone can adopt such and gain usage by the masses. I personally think that the data collected from such if made publicly available, will make the the outcry over surveillance state moot since such capabilities are slowly creeping their way to the masses… I can only imagine the outcry from the church when the printing press started to take hold in its abilities to spread information to the masses…
jmnicolas 13y ago
I think the first commenter on the site said it all : "the systematic exploitation of private personal information by corporations and government is the modus operandi of a surveillance / police state. Already this is being abused for corporate espionage, political benefit, and a host of criminal enterprises. The manufactured pretext that all these erosions of privacy are ok because "we found bad guys" has been the same bogus justification for every single abuse known to history. A simple extension of this illegal principle in practice means privacy and Constitutionally protected rights are null and void. Jobs! Fraud! Crime! "We'll keep you safe!" "We'll save insurance companies money!" "We'll catch criminals!" They don't mention that they'll abuse this in an untold array of intrusions and privacy violations... for their commercial and political benefit."
- walid 13y ago
  Although I'm very much miffed by the excessive surveillance of every country these days I don't find this to be the same. Companies and organizations do have the right to check up on people's activities in some manner. If your car wasn't paid for and it belongs to the bank now, I think the bank has the right to know where it is to repossess it. I think this is one of the ugly truths of reality rather than a matter of abusive behavior.
  - jmnicolas 13y ago
    Did you read the article ? They register the plates of everybody not just the offenders.
  - talmand 13y ago
    There's a difference between a bank finding out where the car is when you default and knowing where the car is at all times before you default.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    But if your car was paid for can they store the information about the time/location they saw it? Can they sell that information? What if there were enough of these devices out there that your information was updated every 10 minutes when you were on the road? I wouldn't object to the scan but the storage of the data is a different matter.
mavhc 13y ago
It's interesting that in a software world the difference between good and bad systems can be a single bit, leave debug=true and accidentally record all your keystrokes, or your wifi packets, or store info permanently instead of temporarily.
sologoub 13y ago
And unfortunately, the data brokers can even argue that the system includes an identity reset just like iOS - just request a new plate from your state... However, this won't work, as linking the two records is trivial via DMV records...
wehadfun 13y ago
Back into parking spaces. Of course in some states you are supposed to have a license plate in the front of your car as well
rmc 13y ago
Thankfully this sort of behaviour is illegal in the European Union, under the Data Protection Directive.
emiliobumachar 13y ago
>repo industry When I saw the title, first think to cross my mind was "what the hell does GitHub have to gain from it?"
- Crito 13y ago
  Correlate an account with a license plate, and now you can have not only an approximate dataset of where people tend to be while commits were made (which you can get with far less precision from IPs), but a decent idea if that location is their home, a business (locating new stealth-startups and identifying their employees by finding new clusterings of people making personal commits during lunchbreaks in a new office?), etc.
EGreg 13y ago
This information is all public, it is only becoming more searchable and cross referenceable by computers. Where have we seen that before? Many years ago when facebook first revealed the Newsfeed. There was a huge backlash, to which Mark Z personally wrote to all users, "Relax, breathe, we hear you." He went on to explain that all the info in the newsfeed was already public, just better accessible to us for consumption. The inexorable march of technology proceeded unabated. The next few years produced the slogan "privacy is dead" on the social networks. So many people now post mundane details of their lives IN ORDER for others to read and to collect "likes". Fast-forward to last year: Graph Search comes out, to help us all find what we're looking for using only the data available to us, and facebook doing the searching. No big splash this time. The graph search is arguable much more dangerous to privacy than ever: http://gawker.com/5978327/men-interested-in-men-in-tehran-and-other-dangerous-real-facebook-graph-searches http://gawker.com/5978327/men-interested-in-men-in-tehran-an... And the inexorable march of technology continues. Remember - it's not that you're caught on camera in a public place that's scary. It's that later, all the information can be cross referenced and mined for any purpose. Should I write a blog post about this?
njharman 13y ago
"ban most uses of license plate readers, ... making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll collection, and parking regulation." That is the worst thing. Either allow everyone or no one. Giving more and more capability to special interests is how we have gotten into being a surveillance state and become very unbalanced authority / responsibility between different segments of society.
- EGreg 13y ago
  Agree!
- Avenger42 13y ago
  I'd allow law enforcement, with the strict rule that the scanner system would have to immediately throw away any plate that they hadn't received a warrant to search for. So they could have the scanner operating at all times, but they'd never get a notification until they happen across one of the (very few) cars they're specifically allowed to track.
  - njharman 13y ago
    Ok, but then why not same rule for others, such as repo?
linuxlizard 13y ago
I see a potential market for a mechanical device that automatically covers up the license plate when the car is parked & turned off. Pull into parking space in the mall. Cover up your license plate. Or, better yet, put an image of random numbers. Ta da!
- Wistar 13y ago
  It will earn you a ticket in most states, at least on a public street. I am, and have been, very interested in countermeasures that obscure plates to non-humans. Bright IR to severely overexpose, shuttered lenses or pulsed LEDs that create severe beat-frequency disruption of the image, some magical thing that causes the characteristics of a plate (retro-reflectivity is a key signature, I think) to not look like a plate to an ALRP so that it won't even think to try and capture, etc. —I mention retro-reflectivity only because within the last few years Washington state has required that license plates be replaced every three years rather than just getting new tabs as it had been forever. I asked a DMV engineer why this policy was put into place and he replied that it was due to decreasing reflectivity over time. Perhaps coincidental but the policy was instituted right about te same time ALRPs started to be used by parking enforcement and police.
Shivetya 13y ago
I am simply against any law that would prohibit the public from this type of information and restrict it to only law enforcement. If its not right for a public company to assemble such records it should be doubly wrong for law enforcement. I tire of passing the police cars festooned with cameras pointing in every direction. What guarantee do we have that the data is any safer in their hands? We don't and the reason is that a law that might offer protection today doesn't have to be in that form tomorrow or after some obscure judge rules otherwise. So I am all for it on the grounds it puts on equal footing with government officials. We should be able to track them too which is most likely the real reason there is a law coming to prevent gathering by private individuals or companies
Ryanmf 13y ago
Easy fix: pay for access to the DB and a few others like it, plot the movements of congresscritters, judges, DAs, et al. and publish. The brokers will be swimming in injunctions by the end of the week.
crystaln 13y ago
Is there any legal way to make a license plate not easily photographable, perhaps with a bright led?
joering2 13y ago
Would be awesome if someone reverse-engineer it: an app that alerts you when a repo truck is around the corner. Imagine all those pissed off truck owners being angry that their publicly available information has been scanned and delivered via alert system to someone trying to hide from a repo truck.
trhway 13y ago
the privacy as we know it has been obsoleted by technology, just like many other things in the past and will be in the future. Instead of trying to save terminally ill patient - privacy - we need to look into the future. The real fight is who owns the data, not whether the data is collected. For example can we just force that all the data anybody has about anybody is to be public?
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  Privacy returns when all surveillance becomes a two-way channel. If someone watches you, you would know who it is and can watch them right back, change your behavior for as long as they watch, or demand that they stop entirely. The problem we are having now is not just that people are watching us, it is that we also don't know who they are or when they are doing it.

146 points by samkline 13y ago

This is quite interesting. On the one hand, I do understand that autoloans are very easy to default on. So there should be some method for loan companies to get these vehicles back. However, I also think that loan companies should more carefully screen their applicants. Of course, that would mean that loan companies make less money on loans and fees, and that they lose money on reselling cars that are already partially paid for. So I'm conflicted. But I don't think that the mass collection of data is the way to go, ever. And I wonder about the legality of putting up a "fuzzy" license plate. Say if your plate number is 123-AB12G or whatever, you simply write on a piece of cardboard "One Two Three Dash Aye BEE One Two Gee." I'm sure there's legislation against that, though.

talmand 13y ago
If the loans are so easy to default on, maybe they should rethink the current practices instead of considering a system that's so easily abused to invade people's privacy?
- zacinbusiness 13y ago
  I agree 100%. Loan recovery people are usually pretty vicious, so this sort of thing doesn't surprise me too much.
landryraccoon 13y ago
Strict screening will make it harder for the poor, who have poor credit, to buy a car. Tracking vehicles will make lenders less paranoid about lending, which will enable less wealthy households to lend. IMO if you're wealthy ( like the vast majority of the readers of HN ) you should be able to opt out of tracking for an additional financing feel whereas the poor should still be able to voluntarily subject themselves to tracking in exchange for a more favorable rate. Personally I wouldn't care if the bank is tracking my car while it's not paid off, so I'd go for the lower rate anyway.
- zacinbusiness 13y ago
  I can see a sort of opt-in thing working. And that would be better than just sending out camera equipped cars to scan all the vehicles. But in the same way that I would agree to a tracking system I would also agree to an automatic debit from my account each month. At least that way there's no location data for the government to subpoena.
- Wistar 13y ago
  The "Buy Here Pay Here" car sales lots that sell primarily to low-income folks often install tracking equipment in the vehicles they sell as a part of the deal. Ken Bensinger's 2011 LA Times series about the practices of Buy-Here-Pay-Here car sales businesses: "A vicious cycle in the used-car business" http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/30/business/la-fi-buy-here-pay-here-part1-storyb http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/30/business/la-fi-buy-h... Fairly depressing.
  - GFischer 13y ago
    To me, used to the abusive interest rates here in Uruguay, 20% sounds really good. And while the tactic they used to repossess the car was pretty shady, they were in their right. And 25% default rate is tough. It's depressing, but the alternative would be leaving people with no financing options. A NGO or maybe a startup that helped people balance their economies would be doing a lot of help, in the U.S. and everywhere. I've read about some that try to disrupt lenders, including a Y Combinator backed one (LendUp). http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/lendup-raises-14m-from-google-ventures-data-collective-to-disrupt-payday-lending/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/lendup-raises-14m-from-goog...

evan_ 13y ago

Terrifying startup prospect: Imagine a small dashcam-like consumer device that was able to perform the same type of license plate recognition coupled with GPS location. A data collection company could provide these devices for free or at a low cost to anyone, and then pay drivers for every license plate scan their box sends in. Obvious downfall: someone will figure out how to spoof a GPS signal and randomly generate license plate images on a computer monitor and make a bunch of money for uploading junk data.

smackay 13y ago
I'd pay good money to track down the aggressive clowns I meet on the highway or those who came close to killing me on a pedestrian crossing. The long arm of ... revenge.
- diydsp 13y ago
  ...and someone else would pay good money to a clown to put on a fake license plate cover of their business rival and commit aggressive acts, so vigilantes and a mob would go after them. We need time-varying crypto license plates. apparently.
berberous 13y ago
You realize that's essentially what's already happening the article, right? Large databases companies like DRN are providing free or low cost ALPRs to repo men who submit a minimum number of records per month. I'm not sure consummerizing it makes it much more terrifying, given the tremendous size these databases have already achieved.
- evan_ 13y ago
  At a certain density of plate scanning devices, the plate tracking becomes real time.
DanAndersen 13y ago
When Google Glass first was announced, I imagined a future where it would become more common to rent out access to one's vision. I imagined a service, called BuyMyEyes, that would set up per-minute or per-user fees that sellers could use to offer access to their line of sight to interested viewers. Then there could be a chatbox where the viewers input what the "eyes" should go look at next. In such a world, I could imagine a system where police departments send a notification: "The person 50 feet in from of you is a potential person of interest in an investigation. Keep him in your line of sight for 10 minutes and win a free iPad!"

sbarre 13y ago

I think the article nails it on the head when it talks about technology getting ahead of social/legal controls. I'm sure when license plates were devised, no one thought ahead to the day a single unregulated for-profit company could automate the scanning and geolocation of many millions of vehicles a year.

rmc 13y ago
There are legal controls in some places. The EU has had Data Protection law since 1995. There was a lot of history in Europe of organisations (usually countries) collecting massive amounts of data on people.

r0h1n 13y ago

I'm curious - how exactly would one refute the following argument put forth by data brokers and repo agents? > But Digital Recognition and other so-called “data brokers” who collect plate scans are fighting Hecht’s bill, arguing that repo agents are not invading privacy when they scan a license plate, which is available for all to see. The data brokers do not disclose the owner of the plates, they point out, though customers such as banks, insurers, and private investigators have ready access to that information.

iamsalman 13y ago
Come to think of it -- humans can't memorize all the number plates they see. Machines can. It's the "recording" of these images (though there for everyone to see) which takes us into the gray area.
- chiph 13y ago
  In addition, the problem most people don't recognize with this, is the database keeps a history of where the car has been seen. This history is ripe data for divorce attorneys who can use it to show that assignations at motels took place. Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems - I had a neighbor who split up because the Google car photographed a motorcycle in their driveway that wasn't the husbands.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    > Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems No, affairs can cause marital problems. Technology just makes it easier to get caught This is not a vindication of the technology in question, but it can't be blamed for everything. I can't help but think that cheating business travellers had it a lot easier before the advent of ubiquitous, near-free mobile long distance telephony made it easier for spouses to keep tabs on the travelling partner. That doesn't make telephony a cause of marital problems.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago

iamsalman 13y ago

Eventually, our new found love for collecting lots and lots of data about everyone and everything would come back to haunt us, making some billionaires and a vast majority living under surveillance. Sketchy but probable.

darksim905 13y ago

Where exactly do they get their scanner tools from? I always thought these were police/3 letter agency only?

walid 13y ago
I read a half of the article and it doesn't seem to mention where from, but all you need is a camera with image recognition. Number plates are much easier to spot than faces since they are very uniform and flat and would only be translated in an image.
imroot 13y ago
I've seen these cars in the Cincinnati area. They're using the same technology (Cameras, at least) that the Law Enforcement folks (Ohio State Highway Patrol) are using, but on a 4 year old Honda Civic versus a Crown Vic/Dodge Charger/Chevy Impala.
weavie 13y ago
The article says they cost 10,000-17,000 which surprises me. Surely an iPhone would be enough technology for this?
- rmc 13y ago
  In the same way an iphone can be good enough for your wedding photos? These are high quality cameras, that have to work in large range of weather and lighting conditions. This cost might also include the software to OCR and store the details.
  - hengheng 13y ago
    Parent's point was valid though, I can't imagine these devices to cost more than $170 in a couple of years, making this discussion quite relevant.
    - RyJones 13y ago
      Until the cost of grinding glass comes way down, this won't be true.

crypt1d 13y ago

I really, really want to say that I think this technology is a bad idea. But I don't. I don't think that the technology is the problem here, as Digital Recognition said they are not _technically_ invading privacy since the license plates are available for everyone to see. And if you outlaw it, whats stopping a few crooks organizing their own underground data collection and selling the stuff on a black market? Rather, I'd prefer to see a different way of "licensing" cars. Maybe some kind of RFID chip that can only be read by law enforcement? I know its quite unlikely something like this will ever happen, but anyway.

hrjet 13y ago
> I'd prefer to see a different way of "licensing" cars. How about an LCD screen that shows a captcha image of the license number? The captcha image can be regenerated after a set interval, for example, a day. Edit: This would have the benefit that humans can still read it, but making it difficult for OCR.
- talmand 13y ago
  Well, consider that a government agency would still have to keep a database of what captcha tags were assigned to you on any given day at any given time, then it wouldn't be difficult to tie the two together. At that point you don't need to decipher the captcha, just compare pixels.
- gnerd 13y ago
  Weren't modern license plates made the way they are to aid automatic (or human) detection? For instance, traffic cameras, automated scanning from traffic police to make sure your car is insured or even your elderly neighbour writing down a license plate late at night after seeing a car speed away from a possible hit-and-run.

ctdonath 13y ago

Is this discussion any different than the one we had a couple decades ago when credit/debit cards went from occasional use to primary currency? There was huge outcry about how everyone would be tracked, how every purchase you made could be aggregated and monitored and tracked and sold and leveraged, how personal problems could arise when a spouse or lawyer saw inappropriate purchases on bank card records, etc etc. Today, we still acknowledge those problems - while using those cards, having just given in to the sheer convenience of its regardless of the data mining that occurs. I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data.

talmand 13y ago
While true, I would imagine it is much easier for a good number of people to go cash only to avoid that, as opposed to never driving a car again. Then when face recognition kicks in, never going out in public. Might be an opportunity in there somewhere for selling comfortable face masks.
- ryusage 13y ago
  I'm curious when we'll start seeing people dressing like this: http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Hopefully never; discounting war and other emergencies, it's a waste of material. The moment people wearing such things become an issue, the government or a company will get few undergrads to fix the image recognition algorithm and boom, all the protection is gone in the blink of an updating flash memory.
cinquemb 13y ago
>I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data. I've thought about this a lot (because my startup wants to move into this space in a year or so, depends on the progression of wearables like glass) and have drawn the conclusion that the reason the facebooks and googles of the world while being technically capable of executing such an idea, they might see as even trying to do such (based on them basically creating walled gardens around information of which one needs to create an identity to access) would amount to a public flogging of them and maybe no clear way to monetize such capabilities now (just look at foursquare stumbling along trying to do such, and that's without facial recog). But as you note, the technology is here, it's only a matter of time before someone can adopt such and gain usage by the masses. I personally think that the data collected from such if made publicly available, will make the the outcry over surveillance state moot since such capabilities are slowly creeping their way to the masses… I can only imagine the outcry from the church when the printing press started to take hold in its abilities to spread information to the masses…

jmnicolas 13y ago

I think the first commenter on the site said it all : "the systematic exploitation of private personal information by corporations and government is the modus operandi of a surveillance / police state. Already this is being abused for corporate espionage, political benefit, and a host of criminal enterprises. The manufactured pretext that all these erosions of privacy are ok because "we found bad guys" has been the same bogus justification for every single abuse known to history. A simple extension of this illegal principle in practice means privacy and Constitutionally protected rights are null and void. Jobs! Fraud! Crime! "We'll keep you safe!" "We'll save insurance companies money!" "We'll catch criminals!" They don't mention that they'll abuse this in an untold array of intrusions and privacy violations... for their commercial and political benefit."

walid 13y ago
Although I'm very much miffed by the excessive surveillance of every country these days I don't find this to be the same. Companies and organizations do have the right to check up on people's activities in some manner. If your car wasn't paid for and it belongs to the bank now, I think the bank has the right to know where it is to repossess it. I think this is one of the ugly truths of reality rather than a matter of abusive behavior.
- jmnicolas 13y ago
  Did you read the article ? They register the plates of everybody not just the offenders.
- talmand 13y ago
  There's a difference between a bank finding out where the car is when you default and knowing where the car is at all times before you default.
- josephlord 13y ago
  But if your car was paid for can they store the information about the time/location they saw it? Can they sell that information? What if there were enough of these devices out there that your information was updated every 10 minutes when you were on the road? I wouldn't object to the scan but the storage of the data is a different matter.

mavhc 13y ago

It's interesting that in a software world the difference between good and bad systems can be a single bit, leave debug=true and accidentally record all your keystrokes, or your wifi packets, or store info permanently instead of temporarily.

sologoub 13y ago

And unfortunately, the data brokers can even argue that the system includes an identity reset just like iOS - just request a new plate from your state... However, this won't work, as linking the two records is trivial via DMV records...

wehadfun 13y ago

Back into parking spaces. Of course in some states you are supposed to have a license plate in the front of your car as well

rmc 13y ago

Thankfully this sort of behaviour is illegal in the European Union, under the Data Protection Directive.

emiliobumachar 13y ago

>repo industry When I saw the title, first think to cross my mind was "what the hell does GitHub have to gain from it?"

Crito 13y ago
Correlate an account with a license plate, and now you can have not only an approximate dataset of where people tend to be while commits were made (which you can get with far less precision from IPs), but a decent idea if that location is their home, a business (locating new stealth-startups and identifying their employees by finding new clusterings of people making personal commits during lunchbreaks in a new office?), etc.

EGreg 13y ago

This information is all public, it is only becoming more searchable and cross referenceable by computers. Where have we seen that before? Many years ago when facebook first revealed the Newsfeed. There was a huge backlash, to which Mark Z personally wrote to all users, "Relax, breathe, we hear you." He went on to explain that all the info in the newsfeed was already public, just better accessible to us for consumption. The inexorable march of technology proceeded unabated. The next few years produced the slogan "privacy is dead" on the social networks. So many people now post mundane details of their lives IN ORDER for others to read and to collect "likes". Fast-forward to last year: Graph Search comes out, to help us all find what we're looking for using only the data available to us, and facebook doing the searching. No big splash this time. The graph search is arguable much more dangerous to privacy than ever: http://gawker.com/5978327/men-interested-in-men-in-tehran-and-other-dangerous-real-facebook-graph-searches http://gawker.com/5978327/men-interested-in-men-in-tehran-an... And the inexorable march of technology continues. Remember - it's not that you're caught on camera in a public place that's scary. It's that later, all the information can be cross referenced and mined for any purpose. Should I write a blog post about this?

njharman 13y ago

"ban most uses of license plate readers, ... making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll collection, and parking regulation." That is the worst thing. Either allow everyone or no one. Giving more and more capability to special interests is how we have gotten into being a surveillance state and become very unbalanced authority / responsibility between different segments of society.

EGreg 13y ago
Agree!
Avenger42 13y ago
I'd allow law enforcement, with the strict rule that the scanner system would have to immediately throw away any plate that they hadn't received a warrant to search for. So they could have the scanner operating at all times, but they'd never get a notification until they happen across one of the (very few) cars they're specifically allowed to track.
- njharman 13y ago
  Ok, but then why not same rule for others, such as repo?

linuxlizard 13y ago

I see a potential market for a mechanical device that automatically covers up the license plate when the car is parked & turned off. Pull into parking space in the mall. Cover up your license plate. Or, better yet, put an image of random numbers. Ta da!

Wistar 13y ago
It will earn you a ticket in most states, at least on a public street. I am, and have been, very interested in countermeasures that obscure plates to non-humans. Bright IR to severely overexpose, shuttered lenses or pulsed LEDs that create severe beat-frequency disruption of the image, some magical thing that causes the characteristics of a plate (retro-reflectivity is a key signature, I think) to not look like a plate to an ALRP so that it won't even think to try and capture, etc. —I mention retro-reflectivity only because within the last few years Washington state has required that license plates be replaced every three years rather than just getting new tabs as it had been forever. I asked a DMV engineer why this policy was put into place and he replied that it was due to decreasing reflectivity over time. Perhaps coincidental but the policy was instituted right about te same time ALRPs started to be used by parking enforcement and police.

Shivetya 13y ago

I am simply against any law that would prohibit the public from this type of information and restrict it to only law enforcement. If its not right for a public company to assemble such records it should be doubly wrong for law enforcement. I tire of passing the police cars festooned with cameras pointing in every direction. What guarantee do we have that the data is any safer in their hands? We don't and the reason is that a law that might offer protection today doesn't have to be in that form tomorrow or after some obscure judge rules otherwise. So I am all for it on the grounds it puts on equal footing with government officials. We should be able to track them too which is most likely the real reason there is a law coming to prevent gathering by private individuals or companies

Ryanmf 13y ago

Easy fix: pay for access to the DB and a few others like it, plot the movements of congresscritters, judges, DAs, et al. and publish. The brokers will be swimming in injunctions by the end of the week.

crystaln 13y ago

Is there any legal way to make a license plate not easily photographable, perhaps with a bright led?

joering2 13y ago

Would be awesome if someone reverse-engineer it: an app that alerts you when a repo truck is around the corner. Imagine all those pissed off truck owners being angry that their publicly available information has been scanned and delivered via alert system to someone trying to hide from a repo truck.

trhway 13y ago

the privacy as we know it has been obsoleted by technology, just like many other things in the past and will be in the future. Instead of trying to save terminally ill patient - privacy - we need to look into the future. The real fight is who owns the data, not whether the data is collected. For example can we just force that all the data anybody has about anybody is to be public?

logfromblammo 13y ago
Privacy returns when all surveillance becomes a two-way channel. If someone watches you, you would know who it is and can watch them right back, change your behavior for as long as they watch, or demand that they stop entirely. The problem we are having now is not just that people are watching us, it is that we also don't know who they are or when they are doing it.