California Police Chiefs Misrepresent License Plate Privacy Bill | Hacker News Reader

California Police Chiefs Misrepresent License Plate Privacy Bill

eff.org

68 pointsDiabloD329 comments

It worries me greatly when communities, businesses, another private entities start recording the license plates.

Why? License plates are meant to be public, that's why they're on the outside of cars, where anyone can see them. It's no more sinister than knowing your name and address.

Why?

Your phone number is public, but you wouldn't be happy if the lat/long of your phone during various times of the day is public, right?

Maybe not, but if I knew when I bought the phone that I would be legally required to carry a placard around with my current lat/long on it, I wouldn't be shocked if people knew where I was, even if I put the sign down once in a while.

I've got no real issue with being able to cover your plates while parked, but doing so doesn't do much to prevent surveillance or identification - that much is even mentioned in the article.

Walking around in public does not make it reasonable for someone to track where you are at every moment.

Having a license plate doesn't make it possible for someone to track where you are at every moment.

Anyone is able to view a license plate in a public place. Just like names on mailboxes and house numbers, it's a publicly viewable identifier, not an Orwellian form of surveillance.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Would you have a problem with an all-seeing drone flying high above that tracks your every movement and is always recording your movements?

http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/

Also, I don't want everyone knowing my name and address either. Why not post yours here? Or do you have something to hide?

I am genuinely curious : why do people want to cover their plates while the car is parked ?

First paragraph:

>This simple privacy measure would create an opportunity for drivers to protect sensitive information about their travel and whereabouts from mass collection by law enforcement and private data brokers.

I already read it :)

But I still don't see how it works .. this info can still be collected while you are driving. And what kind of info are you worried private data brokers will get out of your parked car ?

Well, if we black mirror it up a bit you could be denied a mortgage because you regularly park outside a bookmakers.

Makes sense.

I still have trouble getting the US mentality.

I frequently mock the CNIL because of its overbearing decisions but AFAIK this kind of organism would prevent this kind of use of your personal data.

"Why are my health insurance premiums going up?"

"You regularly ski, an activity associated with a greater chance of injury."

"You have been visiting a private clinic for months, which raises your risk of having a major health issue you have not yet disclosed to us."

"You regularly eat at McDonalds, raising your long-term health care costs."

Or... "Why has my auto insurance gone up?"

"You are regularly at locations associated with illegal street racing."

"You are regularly near after market parts stores, and after market parts are correlated with high risk drivers."

Well, police cars are driving around all the time. Tireless electronic eyes look out of the vehicle for plates, and records of every single one are made: timestamp, location, etc. The vast majority of the data collected is on people who are not suspected of any crime. But the data can be misused in innumerable ways. It would be easy to pick out patterns and then flag deviations, like the patterns show that this guy works from 8-5, but for some reason, his car was at a hotel from 1-3. On and on.

There are lots of reasons to not want this kind of omniscient eye on us. My favorite is that a lot of laws are wrong, and people are violating the laws righteously, and they will be vindicated by public opinion someday, but it's going to take time for everyone to catch up. We don't want perfect police. There needs to be some slop so that we can see where the laws are wrong.

The problem you describe is its part of mass surveillance, not targeted surveillance.

I feel, even though we're not discussing text, the spirit of this quote is appropriate to mass surveillance post processing:

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." --Cardinal Richelieu.

Discussion about authenticity e.g. here [1]

[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23785/what-did-r...

>Well, police cars are driving around all the time. Tireless electronic eyes look out of the vehicle for plates, and records of every single one are made: timestamp, location, etc. The vast majority of the data collected is on people who are not suspected of any crime. But the data can be misused in innumerable ways.

And - as a side note - whenever there is information stored (and poorly protected, i.e. "always") there is a good chance it will go in the hands of someone that is not the police or government.

There is the known case of the Oakland Police ALPR, which data was initially available through public record request:

http://records.oaklandnet.com/request/8562

Now the data is not "public record" anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if - one way or the other - data harvesting companies would be able to get a copy.

“Data collected by EFF from across the state show that only .08% of vehicle plates captured by police ALPRs are connected to a crime.

Lol. What percentage of cars are connected to crime?

Why are you running data if you don't suspect a crime?

A friend of mine moved to a new neighborhood. Apparently, her neighbor was in the police. She said she was out walking her dog and the neighbor greeted her with her first name and middle name when she had barely moved in. We didn't know her legal middle name was different from what we called her. So we pretty much know he looked her up (driving licence info?) and he wants her to know he looked her up.

Why? Who knows but he did.

Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime in and of itself that officers and anyone else with access (admin personnel & some security guards) are commonly prosecuted for.

We should have a right to security in our information, and privacy of it from meddlers and nefarious actors like the aformentioned neighbor. Sadly, many of my fellow Americans are all to happy to claim they have nothing to hide, despite how much that attitude continues to hurt them.

> Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime

I'm not disagreeing with this, but I don't think we can trust people to make a system that, e.g., automatically collects and stores the locations of all cars with plates visible to all the roving police cars -- and then not use that information improperly.

I'm hoping that we'll gradually choose deliberate ignorance of certain things we could know because although the knowledge could be helpful in certain cases, it's also too dangerous.

There shouldn't need to be such a choice. Make both more difficult - license plate tracking and inappropriate lookups.

Is she a renter or an owner? If the latter, her name could probably be found on the property sale records which are public.

Why should it matter, said officer shouldn't be querying NCIC to dox his neighbor. I doubt he actually bothered to use the local parcel viewer.

In this case, Renter. Just moved. License would still have old address. You couldn't have "accidentally" found someone like that.

It matters because to make the inference that he was connected to the police and misused police resources to find her information, that information has to not be readily available to the general public.

If she had been an owner, the information would be available to the public, and not even all that odd for a neighbor to look up (I look up sales records for houses that sell in my neighborhood to see what they sold for, for example, to get an idea of how the market is).

You’re making a bunch of leaps in logic here. How do you know he is law enforcement? Also, you said she just moved, so how does her license have her new address? So how exactly did he identify her to look her up?

Maybe he just saw a piece of her mail.

Edit: also, the most obvious question: why didn’t she do the normal thing and ask “hey, how do you know my name?”

Seriously, a stranger stating your full name including a middle name they shouldn't know doesn't seem threatening to you?

Speeding is a crime, so about 99.998%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com