Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

Private license plate tracking.

At some stage license plates will have to disappear, but then you move to facial recognition for cars and other meta data, they probably have unique sounds for instance.

I'd try and do a app like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_barcode_games

You should know how to monetize it.

(Obviously facial recognition works equally well here, but there is some regulatory attention, although none that would stop you)

I'd also look at things like using neural nets to detect race and/or underlying genetic structure from visual, audio and other metadata.

View on HN

I am not sure why this comment was marked dead without any responses, and hence I am "vouch"-ing for it. Can someone point to laws related to license plate tracking?

It seems to me that having a huge database of known locations of vehicles could be used to do some cool (but likely immoral) things, specially coupled with the fact that several state agencies all over the world make it free and easy to retrieve licensing and ownership information for vehicles. It'd also be relatively much easier to do compared to facial recognition.

Big question is, how would you do it at scale? You can crowdsorce data, but then it's hardly precise or frequently updated data. Sort of a thing that vinwiki does now. Govt has a head start on it with speed cameras/traffic light cameras etc, but there only so many of them.

The wildest idea I can think of is using reverse camera on every car and recognizing the plate of the car which is tail gating you. Now, that's more interesting, but how much of a fleet you would need to track down a random car.

Not something car manufacturers would do either, even with their love of telemetry.

I don't recall the exact article, but I believe they "crowd source" the data via repo-men & tow trucks with automatic scanners. https://drndata.com/

I am sure this is forbidden in the netherlands at least. You may not track personal information without agreement. You may track people and data in your own house though. If you own a company, tracking is allowed, but you have to notify people that you are doing that.

(About provate property: https://www.security.nl/posting/406881/Juridische+vraag%3A+m... )

In Spain is almost the same, you are dealing with personal data, if you automate that you have to notify people of that and they can request you to delete the data.

I can't imagine why college campuses and other places where vulnerable people live don't already do license plate tracking. (OTOH, I think organized crime already knows how to circumvent it, and petty criminals often don't drive, don't drive with plates, or don't drive their own cars. But there is still a range of usefulness for e.g. stalking.)

> I'd also look at things like using neural nets to detect race and/or underlying genetic structure from visual, audio and other metadata

I don't see the use in sufficiently cosmopolitan cities, which are the only places with the camera density to do this. I think there's a better case for (using audio recordings) predicting social circles, because close associates tend to pick up both tonal patterns and vocabulary patterns.

Most cars have GPS and are connected to the internet [1]... and broadcast unique IDs over the air (TPMS)... we need a way to disable all of that.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com