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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. Question though: how is producing license plate data like this not a disallowed privacy invasion? It seems like you could totally track who's parking where and potentially do nasty stuff, if you know (say) someone well-off whom you don't like and who doesn't seem to mind getting tickets on a regular basis.

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Thanks!

I thought so to until recently and was honestly kind of surprised they actually gave it to me. They rejected giving license plate info at first, but they've given it out in other, similar, FOIA requests.

Specifically in FOIA's statute, it says:

    (c-5) "Private information" means unique identifiers, including a person's social security number, driver's license number, employee identification number, biometric identifiers, personal financial information, passwords or other access codes, medical records, home or personal telephone numbers, and personal email addresses. Private information also includes home address and personal license plates, *except as otherwise provided by law or when compiled without possibility of attribution to any person.*

In other words - if the dataset itself doesn't have identifying information, then it's not considered private. That said, I've played around with re-identification using this dataset as a POC.. and then deleted the code, because yeah - it's scary.

That is scary, thanks for sharing. And for those here who don't seem to be worried about the safety aspect, note that this means any corporation with a lot of your personal info (insurance, Equifax, etc.) could just submit a FOIA request to get the license plate number of anyone in Illinois (and likely other states) who's parked anywhere illegally, whether intentionally or accidentally... and then strike a deal to gather license plate scanning data to track where you go and what you do. Heck, I wonder if this sort of thing is already happening and we just don't know about it.

I think, because he glossed over it in the post, that you are underestimating how much work Matt does to get the data & how much the governments he works with try to hinder & redact it.

In some cases that is a very good thing. In other cases it’s just them trying to obfuscate and block transparency.

In the US there is an entire industry that scans license plates on public streets and sells the data. Basically no privacy in public.

(random example: https://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2015/01/private_comp... )

I forgot about this, but at the same time that doesn't imply it's legal for a government agency to just give it away. There are obviously industries that gather up all your personal information from address and DoB to SSN but that doesn't mean a government agency can just give it out to a random nobody.

The difference in rational is pretty simple: A plate identifies a vehicle. A vehicle is not a person. Govt can't give out personally identifiable information.

But a plate identifies a vehicle _and_ its owner—not just a vehicle.

A vehicle’s owner is public information in the US. Credit Karma knows the vehicles I own based on DMV records, and recommends me insurance accordingly.

And they know that because your PII (name, address, social) is mapped to a profile, and that profile is also mapped to license plates and Vins. So you can use one to look up the other info in either direction.

Addresses can be used that way to, but an address as a stand alone data item is used for every public land record in existence.

Think of a license plate as an 'address' for a car.

Criminal proceedings are usually public in most countries. Where do parking tickets fall? Even if not technically criminal, some might, for the same underlying reasons, consider it acceptable for "someone well-off whom you don't like and who doesn't seem to mind getting tickets on a regular basis" to have this illegal behavior on the public record. "Don't want your name tarnished? Don't park illegally."

[Edit: on the other hand, if the ticket is unfair (eg. confusing signage as in this example), then you have a valid point; I just wanted to point out the other side of the coin]

I was asking about the legality, not the morality. If it's not technically criminal then that's all that matters.

Also, this is completely missing the point here:

> Don't want your name tarnished? Don't park illegally.

It's not about reputation, it's about privacy -- and safety.

Don't know about where you are, but in Ontario Canada (the only place I've gotten in enough trouble to care about the difference ;-) ), there is a criminal code and the highway traffic act. There are illegal things that you can do in your car that may be in either or both areas.

"Criminal" means in the criminal code, but both are illegal. I think that you don't have a right to privacy for either because it obfuscates the application of the law. Indeed, the Japanese government can query the Ontario government to get a list of transgressions that you had while driving a car in Ontario (I know this because they did so when I converted my driver's license to a Japanese one -- and they didn't need my consent).

I think OP's use of the term "criminal" is a bit loose, but I would be surprised if you have any right to privacy for a a fine levied due to a legal infraction. Whether or not you should have a right to privacy is a completely different conversation...

Aside: It was important to me because many years ago I inadvertently drove while suspended. I had an unpaid ticket that I had forgotten about and my license was suspended. The suspension got lost in the mail (first a postal strike and then the delivery person put my mail in the wrong "super box" -- I eventually got it months later). When I was first getting my visa for Japan, I needed to find out if this was a criminal offence or a highway traffic act offence.

In WA at least all traffic offenses are public record. You can go search court databases by either name or license plate to get the full details of any tickets and charges in that system.

What you say is true. It's also the case that there's a lot of information that is nominally public--often for very defensible reasons--which historically took significant effort to get at and, even then, only in a very limited and manual way.

Today, a lot of that information is at least a lot more accessible to everyone (though in this case it still took a lot of work) and, furthermore, it can be mashed up with other public or semi-public data.

I'm pretty sure this is something we'll be collectively be coming to terms with for a long time.

Voter registration records being a perfect example - anyone can look up my address because the state makes it incredibly easy to pop my name into a website and there it is.

Of course, historically you could look up the address for most people through the white pages.

But that doesn't change the basic point. If you were to ask if you should be able to look up anyone's physical address by typing their name into a web page, I suspect many people would say no. Yet, here we are.

(I also suspect that many would be really shocked at the amount of info available about them from "deep web" searches much less via a $20 online background check.

Parking tickets aren't criminal offenses.

In a lot of states you used to be able to get the address of a license plate with $5 in admin fees. Not sure if that is still allowed.

The TL;DR is: "any criminal records is public information". Fundamentally, even if it's very minor, it's public information until expunged, cleared, or sealed. I think most people are generally fine with this, it's only really a problem if you consistently are committing offenses.

I wouldn't be that generous. You park 15 mins longer than permitted once outside your workplace, and now your violent ex knows where you now work.

Maybe. But I think the benefit to society of publicly knowing violations outweighs this potential abuse. Also, it would be a problem to allow government to secretly prosecute, even for very minor offenses.

I'm very skeptical about drawing a line from "not sharing license plate numbers tied to address of offense when it comes to traffic fines" to "secretly prosecute".

Your violent ex would know your license plate number, but not know where you work?

I'd wager most people switch jobs more often than they change license plate numbers.

This is not criminal though?

It is. If you get a parking ticket that means you are being charged with a crime, the crime is just a minor infraction.

Parking tickets are civil, not criminal.

Source? I'm not a lawyer and I don't know Illinois law, but I have generally read these are civil and not criminal offenses, e.g. https://www.wisemantriallaw.com/blog/2012/august/the-differe...

If that were the case, wouldn't the municipality be required to provide a defense attorney? Or is that only for felonies?

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