California residents are noticing new license plate readers that appear to be operated by the Border Patrol. Some have had confusing encounters with agents.
The real problem with this sort of thing is that there’s no legal way to avoid it. If you’re operating a motor vehicle on public roads, you need to have a plate visible. You can’t obscure it.
The laws requiring that visibility were made in an era where it wasn’t possible for someone like Flock to enable anyone who can aim a camera at a road to mass-log and aggregate and data-mine the movement it provides.
The only real technical solution would be to back out the laws requiring license plates to be visible (and it wouldn’t be perfect, since Flock will still look for identifying oddities on a vehicle and try to log that too, like collision damage). But if you do that, then you lose an important tool for dealing with motor vehicle theft and finding vehicles involved in crimes.
And there aren’t restrictions on selling or doing whatever companies want with the data. Or with data that they get from facial recognition/gait data in the future, or that sort of thing.
My own personal preference would be for ALPRs to be generally illegal, outside of maybe some areas where logging is normally done by the government, like at border crossings. That’d be hard to enforce – someone could always run a rogue ALPR and it’d be hard to find — but it’d probably keep the scale down, avoid the mass deployment that makes the surveillance omipresent.
And I think that it’s worth remembering that even if you are comfortable with, say, Flock’s policy on dealing with data, there’s no guarantee that they aren’t compromised — a lot of very sensitive databases have been compromised in the past.
In the past, technical limitations permitted a certain level of privacy in society. It just wasn’t technically possible to build mass surveillance at scale, so it didn’t happen. But…as those technical barriers that some of us just took for granted go away, I think it’s worth asking whether we want to engineer in legislative barriers, to ensure that there is a certain amount of privacy provided members of society.
The real problem with this sort of thing is that there’s no legal way to avoid it. If you’re operating a motor vehicle on public roads, you need to have a plate visible. You can’t obscure it.
The laws requiring that visibility were made in an era where it wasn’t possible for someone like Flock to enable anyone who can aim a camera at a road to mass-log and aggregate and data-mine the movement it provides.
The only real technical solution would be to back out the laws requiring license plates to be visible (and it wouldn’t be perfect, since Flock will still look for identifying oddities on a vehicle and try to log that too, like collision damage). But if you do that, then you lose an important tool for dealing with motor vehicle theft and finding vehicles involved in crimes.
And there aren’t restrictions on selling or doing whatever companies want with the data. Or with data that they get from facial recognition/gait data in the future, or that sort of thing.
My own personal preference would be for ALPRs to be generally illegal, outside of maybe some areas where logging is normally done by the government, like at border crossings. That’d be hard to enforce – someone could always run a rogue ALPR and it’d be hard to find — but it’d probably keep the scale down, avoid the mass deployment that makes the surveillance omipresent.
And I think that it’s worth remembering that even if you are comfortable with, say, Flock’s policy on dealing with data, there’s no guarantee that they aren’t compromised — a lot of very sensitive databases have been compromised in the past.
In the past, technical limitations permitted a certain level of privacy in society. It just wasn’t technically possible to build mass surveillance at scale, so it didn’t happen. But…as those technical barriers that some of us just took for granted go away, I think it’s worth asking whether we want to engineer in legislative barriers, to ensure that there is a certain amount of privacy provided members of society.