[HN Gopher] Data brokers selling license plate location and anal... ___________________________________________________________________ Data brokers selling license plate location and analytics data Author : JohnMakin Score : 81 points Date : 2023-07-26 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.tlo.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.tlo.com) | TechBro8615 wrote: | My instinctual reaction to this has always been "well, you drive | around in public, and your license plate is on the back of your | car, so of course you can't expect privacy of it any more than | you can stop someone from following you and taking photos of it." | | And generally I feel it's a valid argument, but it exposes two | root problems: | | 1) Scale: There is a clear difference between a single person | photographing license plates in a parking lot, or even a single | person following one car, compared to an enterprise | industrializing that tracking process through wholesale procuring | of security camera footage or similar. | | 2) Linkage: Even if your license plate can be tracked, why should | it be linked to your identity? The answer is that it really | shouldn't. Of course you can register your vehicle to an LLC, but | even if you don't do that, you shouldn't expect anyone on the | road to map your license plate to your address. But again we | return to the problem of scale, because ultimately someone could | see your car in your driveway, then see it on the road, and | therefore know your starting location and current location. | | The first problem of scale, while clearly exposing an obvious | difference, doesn't seem easily resolvable to me, because at what | point is a process "industrialized?" How do you legislate against | this without imposing on constitutionally protected activity, or | at least basic pseudo-freedoms like freedom of commerce? And how | do you avoid regulatory capture granting carve outs to a few | anointed large corporations to continue the practice, especially | if they're the same corporations that "contract" with the | government? [One side-problem/solution here is the lack of | transparency of, or restrictions on, government purchasing | "public" data.] | | The second problem of linkage, seems more easily addressable (no | pun intended). States should put more protections on license | plate databases, and make it easier for people to register their | vehicle through a proxy, even without needing to create an LLC. | But you still have the problem of "manual" linkage using photos | of driveways. | | But the larger, perhaps root issue, is that modern technology is | exposing a middle ground between "private" and "public" | (meta)data - we see this with enterprise-scale tracking of public | information, and also with "personal data" shared with limited | audiences on social media sites, where it's obviously not | _private_ because you intend to share it with people, but you | also don 't intend to share it with _everyone_. | CPLX wrote: | We can just make it illegal if we want. We can pass a law and | then enforce that law. | | There's plenty of precedent for similar laws. Credit reports | are another form of aggregating information about you that | comes from other people's reporting and it's extremely | circumscribed. | | You can't keep files on what people think of my credit history | without following very very detailed rules, as well as being | strictly liable in private action for breaking any of the rules | even by small technicalities. | | We can outlaw this if we want. Or restrict it heavily. | | I'm tired of listening to arguments that we can't regulate | commerce. It's just learned helplessness after listening to | generations of corporate lobbying. | zen_1 wrote: | This comes down to the difference between certain people around | town recognizing your car if they happen to see it pass by, vs | them hiring dedicated car-watchers all around town to keep | track of your comings and goings and selling the data to anyone | who comes asking. One is acceptable, the other is simply not. | phantom784 wrote: | Privacy could be a use case for those e ink license plates that | have started showing up in California. | | Instead of the "real" number, change the plate every 5 minutes | using some sort of OTP algorithm. Makes it impossible for | anyone with a camera to put together a location database, but | the car is still identifiable by law enforcement if necessary. | cryptonector wrote: | An OTP license plate scheme is a very interesting idea. The | license plate would probably have to get larger to | accommodate more characters. | | EDIT: I wonder why you got downvoted. I've recently been | seeing a lot of downvoted comments that there's little | conceivable reason to downvote, so I wonder if downvoting is | a new way of trolling. | floren wrote: | Well, for starters, if you witness a hit and run and don't | note the EXACT time along with the plate number, you're | outta luck. | tzs wrote: | Assuming that the function that generates the plate | numbers from the current time and a per plate seed is | deterministic this shouldn't be a problem. | | You tell the police you saw the car with plate 2XYZ345 do | a hit on run and give a time range. The state would have | the seeds in its plate owner database and could generate | a list of all cars that had 2XYZ345 sometime in that time | range. | Johnny555 wrote: | Presumably such a system would keep a history of expired | identifiers, so law enforcement could still look it up | after it's been expired and replaced with a new one. | mike_d wrote: | It is being downvoted because it is a silly idea. These | systems are ran in cooperation with the state, who in turn | would just un-OTP your plate at the time of scan. That | means average citizens are the only ones who would end up | with less data. | Johnny555 wrote: | _That means average citizens are the only ones who would | end up with less data_ | | That doesn't sound like a drawback, I can understand the | public benefit of the police being able to look me up by | license plate number but not for the average citizen | being able to do the same. This is separate from the | issue that there should be stricter limits on law | enforcement use of the data. | brightlancer wrote: | I can understand the public benefit of the government | being able to stalk me but not for the average citizen | being able to do the same. When the government does it, | it's obviously for The Greater Good(tm). | mike_d wrote: | Average citizens are not the ones operating bulk | collection systems. They are simply writing down a plate | number of the car parked next to them when they find a | giant door scratch in a parking lot. | baby_souffle wrote: | > Makes it impossible for anyone with a camera to put | together a location database, but the car is still | identifiable by law enforcement if necessary. | | Isn't it LEO that's deploying most of these systems? At least | around here, *MOST* of the motorola cameras I see are on | public roads / traffic signals. Bit of google shows EFF and | other orgs FOIA-ing various counties in CA and a lot of them | got federal money for their police to install them... | darkclouds wrote: | Privacy is a luxury only the rich can buy. | brightlancer wrote: | > Makes it impossible for anyone with a camera to put | together a location database, but the car is still | identifiable by law enforcement if necessary. | | First, let me laugh at the idea that state and local LE could | technologically do anything that the public is unable to do. | | Second, let me cringe at the idea that it's OK for the | government to stalk individuals. | confounded wrote: | Had never heard of these plates. At least the current models | may well make the problem worse: | | > _" In addition to the flexibility of the display, the | digital plates also sport a tracking device that will alert | the police to the location of a stolen vehicle and allow for | general vehicle tracking. While a lot of people can get | behind the idea of never going to the DMV again, not a lot of | people are thrilled about the whole "license plate as | tracking device" angle"_ | | From: https://www.reviewgeek.com/4225/california-unveils-new- | e-ink... | ssss11 wrote: | Scale, Linkage and Permanency. If I drive around, people seeing | that don't permanently record it but a data broker will. | | These have long been things overlooked by the "who needs | privacy" crowd but they're what's most important. | b1gbr0ther wrote: | There is a third concern besides scale and linkage -- errors | and accountability. Sometimes these services are _wrong_. | | When they are wrong, and people get arrested, go to jail, or | pay thousands in legal fees to clear themselves...there is no | accountability. Sometimes, the law enforcement who use the | systems rely _ONLY_ on these systems, not on the underlyer data | (e.g. images) to validate an arrest. | | Minimally, the services should have to produce an original | image/video when surfacing information that will be used for | legal action. Secondly, the services should be held financially | responsible for legal costs when mistakes are made. | | https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recogni... | notquitehuman wrote: | I'll add a fourth: these services will inevitably be hacked, | their data added to multiple darkweb data dumps, and | circulated among nation states, hackers, and advertisers for | the rest of time. | bippihippi1 wrote: | would you really not expect that people shouldn't follow you | around? if i drive around the city taking pictures of you in | your car, that's harassment. why can a company do it? it's one | thing for it to be available for polling if there's a crime, | it's another thing to sell that data to anyone | brightlancer wrote: | > if i drive around the city taking pictures of you in your | car, that's harassment. | | Not if you have a government provided license, i.e. for | private investigators. | | It looks like harassment, quacks like harassment, but the | government got their money so they've said it's not | harassment. | JohnFen wrote: | It's still harassment, it's just legally permissible | harassment. | Modified3019 wrote: | If we want thus to stop, we'll need to set up an open source | project that likewise tracks politicians, CEOs and judges. | yegle wrote: | I always had the idea of building something similar to this for | my own use: have a dashcam recording while I was driving, and | every night taking those videos and extract the | timestamp/GPS/plate number and a short video clip of all cars I | encountered on that day. | | I haven't thought too much about why documenting these would be | useful, but on top of my mind I could get answer of these | questions: - have I seen this fancy/unique looking car in the | past? - is this the same douche bag that I saw last week who | can't drive? - what's the last CA plate number starts with now? | Is it 9G or 9H? - are there more people driving w/ a 9[A-Z] plate | in my town? (As a proxy of knowing how many people are still | buying new cars in my town) | alsodumb wrote: | I believe this is illegal in many states. | loeg wrote: | It is sometimes illegal for cops/parking enforcement to do | this, which might be what you are thinking of. | CameronNemo wrote: | Why would it be illegal? You are just filming things you see | in public. | rahimnathwani wrote: | Ring should make a dashcam. | greyface- wrote: | They do. https://ring.com/products/car-cam | rahimnathwani wrote: | Wow, a network of these with ANPR would be better than | fixed cameras. | xnx wrote: | Why get the data piecemeal from license plates, when you can get | it straight from the cars themselves? /s | | "New Tool Shows if Your Car Might Be Tracking You, Selling Your | Data": https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car- | sel... | throwbadubadu wrote: | Related and recent: Autoenshittification! | | https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de... | dpiers wrote: | Is this news? I'm genuinely asking - TLO and other skip tracing | tools have been around for a while, and have been offering | license plate location data for years. | | The ACLU issued a report on how ALPR devices are used to track | people in July 2013 (1). | | Flock Safety (2) was founded in 2017 and has raised $381M from | name-brand VCs like Tiger Global and A16Z. The ACLU raised | concerns about them a year ago in a report. (3) | | No one has been keeping it secret. | | 1: https://www.aclu.org/documents/you-are-being-tracked-how- | lic... | | 2: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/flock-safety | | 3: https://www.aclu.org/report/fast-growing-company-flock- | build... | olyjohn wrote: | No, people do not know these services exist. | brightlancer wrote: | I think people know these exist. As this thread shows, I | think lots of people don't _care_ that it exists, or only | object to the data being sold to Amazon rather than DHS. | JohnMakin wrote: | No, I don't think people realize it. Also, these brokers are | basically the sole gatekeepers for this type of information - | as AI recognition software becomes more potent, I think this | kind of data becomes much more dangerous. | mylons wrote: | how do these services work? is it something on the car giving | away info about the vehicle? | vector_spaces wrote: | It's crowdsourced from PIs and other entities that install | plate readers in parking lots, highways, and on their own | vehicles | | [1] https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/customs-border- | protecti... | | [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone- | wit... | mike_d wrote: | Even better, they lease the camera systems to police | departments to put on traffic lights at major intersections | and along highways. | | When doing a search very few of the hits I've seen have been | from vehicle mounted cameras. | brightlancer wrote: | I can't speak to the ratio, but I know many local law | enforcement agencies which mount these on patrol cars -- | the LE agency benefits from access to the databases and in | return provides data to the databases. | | There are tons of private collectors, but lots of LE | agencies are doing it too. | JohnFen wrote: | It's all about the databases. Reading license plates isn't, all | by itself, a very serious privacy problem. It becomes a | problem, though, when that data is combined with hundreds or | thousands of other data points (each of which also aren't a | huge deal in isolation). | | The privacy violation isn't really in the camera, or the | telemetry, or any other data point you generate that is | collected. It's in the combining of all of these things into a | profile. | timewasterthrow wrote: | I know someone that caught their wife cheating by using the | ChargePoint app the wife used to charge their Chevy Bolt. | | The wife charged their Chevy Bolt at work, which had a paid | 'public' charger at her work site. The wife charged everyday and | left it there so it could maintain battery and AC if she wanted. | The chargepoint app shows the last vehicle that charged there, | and a history of the last few days. | | He checked her works charger histories, and noticed over a few | weeks that on days she said she was still at work, the car wasn't | showing on ChargePoint. He knew she was a charging fanatic. He | drove to the work once. Verified she wasnt there. Called her and | talked to her about how her work day is going. She pretended like | she was at the actual office. She wasnt. At that point he knew, | but took a few more days to fully get proof. | manzanarama wrote: | Can you register cars under a company or other shell entity? I | feel like the only way to get around this kind of stuff is to | have layers of abstraction above your identity. | wmf wrote: | From what I read, the problem is that you need to have the | driver's name on the insurance policy even if the car is owned | by a corporation. | mindslight wrote: | Sure! Enjoy your higher taxes and fees, extra parking | restrictions, and possibly being unable to represent yourself | in court. | davidkellis wrote: | My tin-hat alter ego says the three letter agencies are creating | these companies for the sole purpose of then purchasing the data | and skirting the law. But that guy is crazy. ha ha. | brightlancer wrote: | Why would the three letter agencies need to do that? There's | plenty of money to be made by private businesses doing it with | fewer risks of violating the law. | | And the TLAs aren't interested in selling this info to state | and local agencies, while that's probably the bigger dollar for | private businesses. | colechristensen wrote: | Because sometimes there are laws that prevent governments | from doing things which don't prevent them from buying the | results. | johnea wrote: | In the US it's illegal for anyone to do it. | | This is just as clear a violation of the 4th amendment as | the multi-billion dollar goggle empire. | | But nobody really cares about that do they? Laws are | routinely enforced or ignored based on which option allows | the largest profits for incumbents. | jonathankoren wrote: | The 4th amendment only applies to the government, and has | only ever applied to actual tangible property. This is | being in public where there is no expectation of privacy. | JohnFen wrote: | This. The Bill of Rights doesn't protect us here. We need | plain old lawmaking. | singleshot_ wrote: | The fourth amendment, of course, also applies to private | actors when they become essentially agents of the state, | by taking in a role traditionally within the purview of | the state, so long as the state knows of the activity, | more or less. If you would like a more accurate | definition, you can search for "state actor doctrine" and | you will find some cases about railroads drug testing | employees and parcel carriers searching packages for | contraband. | singleshot_ wrote: | Wait, what? The fourth amendment only applies to tangible | property? So for instance, is cell site location | information "tangible property?" | TechBro8615 wrote: | It doesn't even need to be nefarious or direct. Companies | founded by an "ex TLA employee" have increased credibility, | and might even procure investment from openly CIA-affiliated | venture capital firms like In-Q-Tel. And since the founder | has a security clearance (they're "in the club"), the company | will have no issues procuring government contracts. | | The revolving door works in both directions. | jonathankoren wrote: | They don't need to create the companies. They just buy from | them. | | Anyway, license plate info isn't considered a search because | it's in public, and the SCOTUS doesn't care about how scale | makes what used to be tolerable, a very different beast. | | https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/how-law-enforcement-ar... | | https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/auto... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-26 23:00 UTC)