With the rise of this kind of tech and its prevalence, I think the privacy-focused among us should start pushing to outlaw the use of this tech and eliminate the need for external identification on vehicles.
The parking garage I use every weekday reads my plate, and opens the gate as I have a subscription. Same thing happens when I want to leave. Is that immoral?
It's less about the technology about license-plate reading and more about what people do with the data afterwards.
I would restructure the argument as " I cannot think of a usage for storing the data of a license-plate reader for purpose of selling it which is not immoral." or something like that.
As someone who cares very much about probably I think this is a point that cannot be stressed enough. It is mostly about storage. Storing things is the major danger. Of course there are use cases too, and I would feel uncomfortable with the police tracking every car on the 5 freeway, but tracking requires storage.
Honestly I think your parking garage example is a great use. I can think of others. A notification of your friend or family member pulling into your driveway. Have your house do things like turn on the lights or give you a notification. It could be a good way to do parking meters. I'm sure people could think of more. Technology always has two sides to the coin, it's always a balance of using it only for ethical things. But that requires nuance.
Edit: a cool way to use these might be like we use passwords. Your license plate is a password (or let's say username). OCR is used to identify the plate, then it hashes it, checks the hash with that in the database and bingo, door opens. I think that's a level of privacy most of us are comfortable with. There's no retention of the license plate, no good way to identify who's it is, and if the database is hacked the attacker doesn't get your plate.
Hmm, so would it open for me if I used a photo of your number plate near or over my own plate?
Highway Weigh Stations are ostensibly there to ensure safe commercial vehicle operations. The system I worked on had a number of different sensors. A mile or so before the weigh station, there was a weight-in-motion (WIM) scale embedded in the highway; this part of the system measures (somewhat coarsely) the weight of the vehicle and counts the number of axles it has. Around there, there's also an ALPR and a USDOT reader[2]. Using the weight, ALPR, and USDOT information, a decision is made as to whether the vehicle is required to check in at the weigh station (which is indicated using a road-side sign). There's no fine yet or anything, vehicles are just flagged for further inspection based on:
- measured weight vs GVWR
- company history / safety rating
- a few other factors that I don't recall off the top of my head
There's a few more ALPR cameras sprinkled throughout the weigh station itself, and another one on the highway past the station. These ones are used to track the motion of the vehicle through the system. For example, if a truck has been flagged to stop, and it instead skips the station and keeps on going, the system knows right away that they've bypassed and can send out an enforcement officer. Alternatively, if the plate is seen at the (more accurate static) scale at the station, the system automatically correlates the weight and the plate, and if it's within range, the driver can sometimes leave without even having to interact with any enforcement officers.
[1] Note that it specifically ignored non-commercial traffic unless there was something really weird going on. Categorically was not keeping persistent records of all traffic.
[2] Funny enough, there's no significant regulations specifying the exact font/size/placement for USDOT information, so a reliable USDOT camera is significantly harder to make than a reliable ALPR.
> How hard would it be to remove those bits that ignored non-commercial traffic?
Code-wise? It'd be really easy to add an INSERT that stuffs extra data into another table. But as far as "removing the bits that ignore non-commercial traffic", none of the non-commercial traffic would be in the datasets provided by the various federal agencies (whose acronyms I forget).
Performance-wise? The whole thing is a giant mass of Oracle PL/SQL that can barely keep up with the commercial traffic. If we tried processing all non-commercial traffic through the scoring algorithms etc, the whole house of cards would fall down :D
If you're not trying to log the movements of the public, the usage is likely moral.
I once had a problem with my car in a big carpark. I asked the security guard for help and he wanted my license plate number. He typed it into the computer and the camera found my car and panned and zoomed onto it. Amazing! Much easier than trying to explain the location. So there's your non-immoral example and you can stop worrying.
As for privacy. So what? Where are people going in public that's such a secret? If you want to do something secretly, do it in private. If it involves using the public streets, then accept that it's public.
It really doesn't take much of an imagination to come up with places people might not want others to know they go to.
STD clinics, abortion clinics, AA/NA meetings and gay bars would be some low hanging fruit if you really can't think of any on your own.
> If it involves using the public streets, then accept that it's public.
"If you didn't want your violent ex husband to track you down, you shouldn't have used public streets to get to the shelter"
Nobody seems to mind that Google Streetview shows cars. My sister visited her mother in another city at the time they drove past so now there's a permanent record that she was there at that time to anyone who knows what her car looks like. Is that a problem too?
Quantity has a quality all of it's own.
If you can legally be fired for having police show up at work, then you're at risk of being fired for any reason and that itself is a problem. Solve that problem with employment protection laws like many countries already have.
The conflation of privacy and secrecy is an issue that deserves addressing: When you walk into a public restroom stall, it's not really a secret what you're going to do in there. But you still close the door, don't you?
What I'm doing or where I'm going may not be a secret, but that doesn't mean I want the details logged and sold by some data broker.
How can you travel to any secret place without passing public areas?
It really doesn't take much of an imagination to come up with dozens of examples, so I'll just give a couple: gay bars, abortion clinics