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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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