A California mall operator is sharing license plate tracking data with ICE

This common saying.

I'd rather be paranoid and informed than blissfully ignorant. But a person can only process so much while carrying on with their lives.

The jewel beetle attempts to mate with an amber glass bottle it finds attractive until it dies from exhaustion.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...

We increasingly manufacture our own deception. Deep fakes, targeted advertising, you name it. We are both the beetle and bottle designers. It is definitely worth thinking about.

It's much easier to design glass bottles than to save beetles from the best and worst time of their lives.

Now, as crafty bottle designer, think of all the stuff you could do, given the necessary resources.

> The Irvine Company develops suburban master-planned communities throughout central and southern Orange County, in addition to residential buildings in Santa Monica, Silicon Valley, and San Diego.[6] The company also owns and manages office buildings in Milpitas, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Downtown San Diego, Mission Valley, San Diego, La Jolla Village/University City, Sorrento Mesa, Del Mar Heights, Newport Center, UCI locations, West Los Angeles, Pasadena, Chicago, and New York City.[7]

I'll be interested to see how they respond.

You might say that one type of person wants everyone to be like docker containers, not interfering with one-another and another type of person wants to be like a monolithic application where anyone's problem becomes everyone's problem, but free resources are to be shared.

Oh, absolutely. If someone doesn’t like the surveillance state, this is just another datapoint on an ever-increasing list. Still disappointing, but not uniquely so.

The people so civically unengaged that they actively champion the increased surveillance of modern life right up to the point it’s used against their pet causes disgust me.

A niqab might do for now, but I'm guessing height, gate and precise location might provide too much fingerprinting information.

There have been a few malls in our area that closed after gang related activity and violence in their vicinity became known. If you are a mall owner and have this happen, would you not be remiss to take measures to try to know who is visiting your property and using it as a place to conduct illegal activities?

If a car shows up that is registered to someone on a warrant for a violent crime, should the mall owner do nothing? Not their business?

What about a car registered to someone who lost their license due to DUI? What if that person frequents the mall and kills someone with their car?

I served on a jury where the police were able to gather footage covering like 14/24 hours of the defendants time from a variety of camera feeds (up to 40 I think).

After torturing us with introducing dozens of these videos to build the timeline, the case was fucked up (and defendant found not guilty) because they couldn’t explain NTP in the context of a camera used as the primary time reference point.

I questioned why this was necessary and received a vague hypothetical about domestic abusers/deranged exes harassing employees/kidnapping suspects entering the property, with no clear indication as to how we'd flag such individuals without them having active warrants out.

The only practical use case was perhaps catching vehicles with active Amber Alerts out that might try to hide out on the property.

So the police basically got free intel from us, and we received no incentives to install or maintain such equipment from them.

The Supreme Court has continuously recognized the difference between manual and sustained, remote and automated tracking, even in public spaces [1]. The "seismic shifts in digital technology" we are presently undergoing require vigilance to be maintained in respect of the Bill of Rights.

[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-hol...

   The Government’s position fails to contend
   with the seismic shifts in digital technology
   that made possible the tracking of not only
   Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s,
   not for a short period but for years and years.
   Sprint Corporation and its competitors are not
   your typical witnesses. Unlike the nosy neighbor
   who keeps an eye on comings and goings, they 
   are ever alert, and their memory is nearly
   infallible.

That's the difference, beyond simple public/private. It's not that the license plate display itself is private but storing the data forever and being nearly infallible amounts to an unreasonable intrusion on privacy when handed over to the government. Notably, the USSC in a 9-0 ruling from 2012 held that attaching a GPS tracker to a car also required a warrant. _United States v. Jones, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012).

   it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else. 

This is one of the areas where scaling really matters, and you can do many things with these sort of databases that were simply intractable before. So I find the conceit that it is "just the same" to be inept.

I don't know where the courts and legislators are eventually going to arrive at on this, but if it is as cut and dried as you suggest then you can look forward to a near future where anyone who cares to can buy a detailed dossier on all of your movements for the last decade, say, with known and inferred contacts, assets, etc. It probably won't be very expensive.

Cool, so you won't mind if i install a GPS tracker in your car that tells me your vehicle's location 24/7, since the exact same information can be gleaned from "a person on the street seeing your plate"?

The problem with ALPR is that it allows a few, otherwise occupied people -- such as parking lot attendants or repo agents or policemen -- to drive around like they normally do and automatically collect massive amounts of data on vehicles and their location without incurring any cost on their behalf (beyond "slightly decreased fuel efficiency because the ALPR equipment needs power from the alternator").

The same act of "looking at a license plate and noting down the location" becomes an entirely different thing when conducted at massive scale and at negligible cost.

There are boundaries between reasonable use of nominally public information and the normal expectation of some degree of privacy outside the home.

Examples: The RFK/Triboro bridge in NYC gets 60M crossings annually. I95 at the North/Carolina border gets 14M cars a year. State DOTs publish this information for all interstate and many other highways, so it’s easy to piece see where the flows are.

Additionally, DMVs sell all sorts of information, and auto repair and dealerships sell whatever DMV does not. It’s definitely pretty easy to gather and correlate data like this.

I’d assume that many players, from billboard companies to the feds to fast food operators are collecting this data. It is too cheap to collect and too valuable to many parties for that to not be happening.

As an industry, software is still very young. And as it comes of age in the modern era, its impact continues to reach further and further into the fabric of society. We are more than ever before making ethical questions part of the conversation when developing technology.

Politics and policies making their way into HN is therefore an inevitable evolution. Nothing else.