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Comment by ChrisBland | Hacker News Reader

I think this could be one of those really tasteless jokes that the people who are stationed in truck made. I'd imagine it gets pretty boring in the car, and someone thought it would be funny. It probably is funny to them, but taken out of context it looks really bad.

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Maybe I am the only one, but I thought it was hilarious...especially considered from a satirical context.

We should definitely raise the discussion about government surveillance and how much (or in my opinion how little) should and should not be allowed. We should also discuss how much _private_ corporation spying should and should not be allowed (cough cough Google...partly why I find this is funny).

But this license plate reader car would exist with or without the crudely printed maps logo, let's not pretend it's supposed to be part of some "elaborate" disguise for some new form of government surveillance. This would also imply Google spying on you is ok...which I don't think it is.

Given the crudeness of the sign, it's a likely explanation. You'd think that if they wanted to pretend to be something they aren't they would have put in a bit more effort.

Repo men use these setups to find cars to repo, and they can sell the slurped up data to companies who in turn sell it to insurance companies, law enforcement, banks, and security companies.

First result from google on subject: http://abc7.com/news/repo-industry-collecting-data-on-you/37...

yes..bad. Very, very bad.

I expect Google lawsuits to also be hitting them very soon. (Liable maybe? It leads one to believe google is working with them, giving a bad representation to Google.)

On another note: This kind of "passive" plate reading has got to stop. It's a huge snowball waiting to happen. Next they put it on highways...traffic lights...at which point any governmental agency will know where you went..., when you went..., anytime..., ALL without a warrant....

How do we stop this encroachment on our liberties??

Note: Only speaking about the U.S.A., where this activity IS highly illegal and violates our constitutional rights.

I don't get why they need this data to begin with. They don't need to know what we're thinking, they put those ideas in our heads to begin with. They don't need to know what we're doing, we are following their normative social practices and committing willingly to 30+ year stints of wage slavery in support of their dominant world position.

I wish people would take more exception to the control of their lives than they do to its observation. Knowing where you're going does not encroach on your liberties as much as convincing you to go where they want you 5 days a week, exhausting your motivation, and telling you how to react to it all.

You are dead-on here. 30 year mortgage - normal. 2 working parents - normal. 401k plan - normal. None of these things are really helping you to be in charge of your own destiny, but they sure are helping the government and wall street.

I'm not convinced by this narrative.

Do you have a drop-in compatible comprehensive alternative system?

Also, it's not like life today exists in a vacuum, a lot of history has passed to get us here.

Although I do believe there are better systems, and that adopting one is ultimately a matter of collective choice, it's not clear to me how to get there form here, what what 'there' even looks like.

To be fair, this area of Philadelphia has a number of pretty sensitive government buildings located nearby. City hall, Independence Hall, the US Mint and the Federal Reserve are all within a few blocks of where this car was found.

That said, Philadelphia's parking ticket authority uses these license plate readers to identify vehicles that have been parked in a spot for longer than the allowed time. I'm sure that data gets fed into other databases as well, however.

Heh, Steve Jobs unknowingly solved this problem years ago. Apparently he didn't want a license plate in order to protect his privacy, before plate scanners were a thing. In California you have a certain amount of time after buying a car to get the plate. Steve leased a new car at that interval, and never had a plate.

Ha! When I lived in Palo alto I kept dealer plates on for three years before receiving a ticket: ticket was for speeding, the no plates part cost me all of $10 and a 2 min police inspection, after which the card board plates went right back on.

    When I lived in Palo alto I kept dealer plates on for three years

You meant the special plate with "DLR" embossed vertically on the left?

Sorry, I meant the cardboard advertisements for the dealership.

That loophole has been reduced to 90 days now and new bill has been introduced to require new passenger cars to be issued with a temp license plate just like many other states do.[1]

[1]: http://www.ktvu.com/news/4680503-story

It's been a year since the bill was introduced and it appears to be languishing in the Senate: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billHistoryClient.x...

A new jobs bill.

Or was it to protect him from parking fines? Like asshole teritory?

Woah, I am impressed!

Google should sue for trademark infringement.

Should it be illegal? License plates are in public view, so it seems they're meant to identify the vehicle for whomever sees them.

If people have the right to record that number when reporting a crime (which they sometimes do) then surely the government has the right to keep track of it as well. That is presumably why they issue the plates and require them to be visible to begin with.

It seems unreasonable to allow the existence of license plates and then complain when they're being used for their intended purpose.

I think the difference is is the scope.

For example: http://gizmodo.com/feds-are-spying-on-millions-of-cars-with-...

The Feds are tracking millions of vehicles traveling interstate highways. I heard at a conference that LPR data can at a minimum provide vehicle location and in some cases historical imagery and video through the I-95/I-81/I-87 corridor from Florida to Canada.

That's different than taking security footage at a bank robbery and putting out a bolo for a White Ford Bronco, plate 12345.

There's a similar controversy about Facebook facial recognition. My face isn't a secret -- but at some point large entities (commercial or government) tracking my movements crosses a line that is something more than observation of publicly viewable data.

Facebook didn't issue you your face, and people didn't necessarily sign up for facebook intending for all of their photos to be trackable through facial recognition. The government did issue you license plates specifically to be able to track you. I understand people being paranoid that they've gotten better at their job, but that in and of itself isn't abusive.

A headline like "Feds Are Spying on Millions of Cars With License Plate Readers" implies that the government is doing something nefarious that it doesn't have a right to do, which isn't the case. They're entitled to track your license plate as much as they please.

> The government did issue you license plates specifically to be able to track you.

They issued the plate so that when something happens involving a car, they can look at that car and figure out who the owner is.

That's quite different from tracking. If you have enough license plate readers all over the city, you can get a pretty good picture of all the movements I make. And store them for long periods of time.

License plates were issued to identify the owner of a car. Not to comprehensibly track the movement of all car owners and be able to look up every place I went to in the last year or longer.

The Federal government doesn't issue license plates, so the ability of the Feds to track your movements is a very similar comparison to Facebook. That tracking data isn't just used for criminal investigation... it's sold to insurance companies and other parties.

IIRC, there was a supreme Court case a little while ago that ruled the government couldn't put a tracking device on your car without a warrant; I wonder if there's an argument to be made that, with the prevalence of plate readers, machine-readable license plates are such a tracking decide.

It's more people complaining about unforeseen possible use cases that are now seen and possible rather than the underlying bits of tech that make it possible. (What, should we make cameras illegal?) But because aspects of our law have a tradition of "if it's not explicitly illegal, it's legal, unless you get sued for it and the judges decide it's illegal" then it is not a bad idea to nip these sorts of unintended purposes in the bud with an explicit law before someone actually does it and we have to wait for a long court battle for it to be resolved. (And when that someone is the government, the odds aren't exactly 50-50.)

The harmful use cases are not only entirely forseen, but also realized at this point. Many times over. Government use of bulk data needs to be regulated. Unfortunately, our government has a bit of an accountability problem, so such regulation may not even be useful.

I don't think it was foreseen when license plates were created the harmful use case of having a cop at every street corner with photographic memory and accurate speed measuring abilities who occasionally notes cars down for speeding / running a red light and who is networked with every other cop all working together reporting on such-and-such car now at position x,y while a team at HQ is constantly updating large maps with tacks showing the last known location of car x,y. Agree that the modern tech equivalent of the above has already been happening to various extents. Indeed we're fast approaching a time when we'll have enough sensors-of-all-sorts penetration to be able to track the whereabouts of anything of interest worldwide -- the underlying geospatial tech to make that scale already exists.

>I don't think it was foreseen when license plates were created the harmful use case of having a cop at every street corner with photographic memory and accurate speed measuring abilities who occasionally notes cars down for speeding (...)

That's not a harmful use case. That's an efficient implementation of the intended use case.

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