Traffic cameras expose your location through parking apps | Hacker News Reader

Traffic cameras expose your location through parking apps

notmyplate.com

360 pointsflux_w42261 comments

The gist of it: I can subscribe to location updates for any license plate that I want, without knowledge or consent from the owner of that car.

Something you could do anyway with a network of $50 android phones mounted on bridges over freeways.

But this way you don't have to pay for the cameras - someone else has done it for you.

You'd need to place those, maintain them, prevent vandalism, route power to them, pay for network connectivity and weather-proof them. The price of the cameras is not the problem.

I will place and maintain road cameras for $50/yr, including data connectivity for plates. Minimum 1,000 cameras. 75% uptime/scan rate guarantee.

You'd likely lose a lot of money trying to do that, you're vastly underestimating the cost of maintaining the data network for that kind of installation alone, even before looking at the cost of physical installation.

If it's a bargain, take me up on the offer then.

That's not how the market works.

It absolutely is a bargain. I don't have the money or time to risk but I strongly recommend that you start a company, build a website and advertise your service to the world. I'm assuming you'll also deal with any regulatory and data protection issues, get permission from local authorities etc... . You've found an astonishing gap in the market, it seems.

> get permission from local authorities

For some reason I guess the business plan was about forgetting to get the permits...

Ok, I'll bite. How would you do that? How do they stay connected and powered?

Solar panels, probably.

You'll either have to do this guerrilla style, in which case solar panels will be far too obvious. Or you'll have to apply for all relevant permits, in which case you'll never get them.

Permits? We're not talking a solar farm to power a small device. There are a lot of trail cams that have solar built in, are very small, camouflaged, and motion activated with 20MP cameras for under $200.

We're talking about filming major roads here. "Motion activated" effectively means running 24/7. No way a built in solar panel in a camouflaged trail camera will manage that. Also it doesn't matter how small the device is, if you legally want to attach a camera to any sort of infrastructure overlooking a road, then yes you need permits you almost certainly will not get. You could possibly attach it to a pole on private land next to the road, but even then you'd need the permission of the land owner.

I suppose it depends on the jurisdiction. For instance, some courts, like the 9th District Court of Appeals have ruled that cities can't remove homeless camping on public property. Public forests are public, and there's lots of trail cams.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/court-ruling-homless...

Forcibly moving living people and removing unattended property are entirely different scenarios.

Yeah, the issue with those who are homeless is that it essentially criminalizes living for people who cannot rent or own, and thus infringes on their liberties.

There’s no right to hang up privately owned cameras in public.

I am imagining an army of homeless sitting at every intersection in the US holding surveillance cameras and getting paid by # of unique plates scanned per minute

Reminds me of the company that got homeless people to be 4g wifi hotspots at SXSW

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/13/148506762...

Partner with roadside billboard providers. Sell it to them on the cheap as "analytics", and then just re-sell the LPR data.

I wonder if something like this already exists. This seems like a great business.

By great business I mean it seems like something people would say for. I don’t know if it would actually be valuable data to billboard owners though. But I can imagine a mega unicorn startup advertising IRL advertisement analytics and back-selling the data to tons of data brokers.

A random solar powered android phone is found fastened to a bridge and you can be sure the police are going to look into it and take it down.

Put a police sticker on it and they will think it's theirs and leave it alone.

Within the UK, 4G sim cards and data are cheap. Android phone with tether capabilities, Raspberry Pi with solar and a webcam.

Or even better to save all that faff, root a phone, run the drivers plate OCR software using the phones camera, stick to a gantry and send results via text message. You wouldn't even need live updates, pull the latest data at midnight each day.

Text is cheap.

I suspect the computing and communication parts of a project like this are by far the easiest bits.

Weatherproofing the camera and solar panels, getting permission to get them installed, actually installing them (working at heights over busy roads) and then maintaining them would be pretty expensive. You might also have to pay rent to whoever owns gantries, and what about locations where there aren't any existing gantries?

What about insurance in case you camera falls off the gantry onto a car and kills someone?

Edit: What about roads that don't have network coverage (not that uncommon in the Scottish Highlands)

You wouldn't get permission. Just walk with a phone+solar panel in a weatherproof box. Either use magnets or zip ties to tie to the the pedestrian rail of a bridge overlooking a freeway. Done.

I would likely order some chinaphone motherboards only - for example[1] - without the screen+case+accessories you save ~50% on the retail price. They're then not valuable enough to be worth stealing either.

If it's a small road with no bridges, tie to a lamp post instead.

You need to be able to install 3 per hour to make the finances work out - 10 mins driving, and 10 mins installing, and repeat.

If the city catches you, it's only a littering penalty. They likely wouldn't care.

[1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003892325502.html

Breakeven is 1 year average residency - that has to include failure, end-of-life, theft, and removal by the city.

Anything placed in a location which has easy accessed to pedestrians is going to get stolen and vandalised - particularly once people realise what they are.

if the city catches you and finds you installing multiple cameras on their infrastructure for private surveillance youre pr0jably going to get charged with all sorte of business violations that will cost you thousandw ler camera plus the citys cost to inspect their infrastruxture.

How much power do you need to be continuously running video/snapshots, OCR software, and comms? How expensive a solar panel is needed to generate that power, will it work overnight and through the winter, and will it also be theft-resistant? What's the cost of petrol for driving 4+ hours per day? How will you get coverage in parts of the country that aren't near your home/office?

About 1.2 watts to capture+process 1 frame/second - thats how much my current phone uses, and I suspect a cheaper platform will be more power efficient. You'd use a 5 watt solar panel (costing $4) in the southern USA, and a 10 watt panel (costing $9) in the northern USA. You would aim to rarely have spare power - in winter, you just drop the frame rate and the comms interval.

With more engineering effort, you can probably dramatically reduce power usage, for example by discarding parts of the frame that cars never drive through, which should allow extending the hardwares lifespan as batteries age and solar panels get covered in dust.

Well, I'm slightly less skeptical than I was before. I'm not convinced you can break even for much less than $100 per instance, and I think the risk of getting into trouble is quite high, but there could be something to it.

There is a fairly new automated weather station at the side of the road not far from where I live here in Scotland - the solar cells are actually quite large - I'd guess about 0.50m by 1m. The whole setup is also pretty substantial probably to cope with the fact that supporting solar panels in a windy location requires a fair bit of strength!

Love the style, but wouldn't those boxes be conspicuous? It only takes a few observant people to notice a couple before they spot the pattern and see them everywhere. Then it seems like the game would be up.

> What about roads that don't have network coverage

Satellite. you can buy text bundles. Sure the kit would cost a little bit more, but nothing major.

buy the data from someone else.

Why do you think any city in any Western country will allow you to pepper public property with thousands of surveillance devices?

Right, gov't doesn't like competition

"I will place and maintain"

I suspect a lot of that $50,000 a year would get burned getting a single camera installed.

Only if you do it legally

What does your SLA look like? Do I get to pick the roads? And when do I get my $50k back when you fail to deliver?

SLA: 75% of the cars that pass will be captured. The 25% covers equipment failure/theft/service outage/etc. This applies to the whole set, not per camera.

We mutually agree the roads - but it's unlikely I'll disagree unless you want to place four cameras per country worldwide to maximize logistics difficulties.

Half upfront, half when the service has been operating 3 months. Full refund if SLA not met. If you can show you're very solvent, you can pay in arrears instead.

>for $50/yr..... Minimum how many years?

I see software doesn't seem to be incuded.

Also, your numbers sound like you like to bid for government contracts.

1 year minimum (my breakeven point is 8 months optimistically, 12 months more realistically, and the profit comes from either you continuing the contract past 12 months or from someone else contracting me for the same cameras).

For reference: Speed cameras have an annual operating cost of ~$30,000/year.[1]

[1]: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...

I suspect speed cameras have to produce results that are verifiable in court, while ALPR cameras just best-effort help locate cars.

$1000 per yr in actual op cost. $29000 p/y to pay the contracted company to say it's $30k.

Of course I'm exaggerating. But at the same time gov is not known for being efficient + effective.

I know Philadelphia has a network of publicly accessible traffic cameras that were installed by the city. I assume other places have them too.

Quebec has the same: https://quebec511.info

I thought those kind of networks were pretty common - here is Scotland's:

https://trafficscotland.org/map/index.aspx?type=26

Those cameras are placed in such a way and have a low enough resolution that it is impossible to read the license plates from the public data.

Fair point, you can almost read number plates on some of the cameras that are close to roads. Presumably the cameras are capturing data at a higher resolution than those public images?

I'd bet with a bit of data processing on that video feed (subpixel aligning and stacking all the frames, using the prior knowledge that you know the numberplate isn't changing as the car drives down the road), you'd be able to read them.

Yeah - I was squinting at some of them thinking that the appropriate tech could probably read them.

Not sure why this is being downvoted, it is an actual thing:

“Several companies operate independent, non-law enforcement ALPR databases, contracting with drivers to put cameras on private vehicles to collect the information.”

https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...

Motherboard did a deeper dive on one of them:

“DRN is a private surveillance system crowdsourced by hundreds of repo men who have installed cameras that passively scan, capture, and upload the license plates of every car they drive by to DRN's database. DRN stretches coast to coast and is available to private individuals and companies focused on tracking and locating people or vehicles.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-wit...

To further this, I know someone who was a public defender a decade ago in the US. They would regularly try to get intersection camera footage to attempt to prove their clients not guilty. Often it was impossible to track down who owned the cameras, or even if they were municiple or private. I imagine this has only gotten worse as cameras have gotten cheaper.

Tape over lens and watch who comes out? I am very much not a lawyer.

I'd bet half the time nobody will come out.

So many systems are legacy and entirely unused, or best effort - ie. if the camera is working, it'll be used, but nobody will be sent to repair it if it's broken.

Wow, this sounds very illegal in my state. I wonder if DRN even respects my state's laws about storing my personal information.

Is the location of your state-registered vehicle vehicle on publicly owned roads personal information in your state? Despite the phrasing, I'm honestly curious.

No, but likely his face biometrics are off he happens to have been captured in the video. So if they are keeping the raw video, not just the processed license plate output, they may fall under this jurisdiction.

Assuming you're talking about the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, that only requires consent for facial recognition databases based on facial geometry. The law explicitly allows storing photographs of people's faces without consent.

It's probably not, which is the problem. I feel like the wilful processing of such details into parse-able, privacy-violating form should be regulated.

What state is that, California? I'd love to have a way to block ubiquitous surveillance, also places taking your picture when you walk into a drugstore or restaurant, uploading it. If it hasn't happened yet, we will be tracked all the time.

I didn't downvote it, but $50 for cameras is not even a blip in the cost of setting operation like that, and op's comment make it sound, like that's all you need.

Surveillance is easy now. But not yet $50 easy.

Not even close. Cars on a freeway are doing 10 to 100mph. To capture a plate on a moving car you need less than 1" of movement during the exposure time.

At 10mph a car is moving at 176 inches per second, and to be able to read the plate with less than 1" of movement you need a camera that has a shutter speed of 176th of a second, or rounded up at 1/200th . To capture at 100mph a vehicle is moving at 1760 inches per second. To read the plate you'll need a camera that can capture at 1760th of a second, or rounded up to 1/2000.

I don't know of any android phones that can capture both at 1/2000th and video on a second camera at the same time to know when to fire the first camera.

You assumed the camera was capturing a photo of the car viewed from the side where the full speed is apparent (and ironically where the plate will not even be visible).

Most cameras point down the length of the road and the "speed" that the camera sees is only a fraction of that. You can record a video with a merely-ok phone and probably see most plate numbers assuming the lighting isn't terrible. Good luck getting a phone camera to work at night with an LED flash though

(oh and also, this assumes you want to catch people speeding, to capture every plate number you would just put the camera near a slow area like a bend or stop sign)

I assure you the motion blur, even looking down the same plane (parallel) to the car will not be able to capture the plate, even in decent light on video alone. Go try to take video yourself of a car driving by in full daylight.

The obvious approach is to just train your numberplate recognition algorithm with blurred plates. Since the blur is almost equal across the whole plate, and nearly all cars are moving in the same direction, you aren't really losing much information. Sure, it might be hard for a human to read, but for a deep learning algorithm I don't think it's actually any harder.

But there are other approaches too - like putting a 99 cent novelty zoom lens on the front of your camera to capture more light for your region of interest, allowing you to use shorter exposure times. Or an infrared strobe light that flashes once per frame (most numberplates are retroreflective, so IR strobes work really well).

'Something you could do anyway' with something that would actually cost a huge amount of money and effort to build (those $50 phones probably wouldn't have adequate cameras, and would still need to be supplied power by solar panels or something, not to mention being subject to removal).

did you know that the city of Menlo Park california requires companies to have cameras which can see for miles and track and report all vehicles that drive by them....

look up the largest company in menlo park...

a friend of mine told me - a few years ago - that BART had >4k cameras everywhere. He thought it might be enough to see fingerprints.

If only they put that effort towards... any other aspect of BART...

I wouldn't be surprised if this is because of the trip cap thing that Menlo Park has - which seems purely aimed at Facebook to collect tax revenue. https://almanacnews.com/news/2019/05/01/facing-trip-cap-slip...

yup

Finally. Publish it all. Tracking of every vehicle, visible for everyone.

It has been that way with aircraft for a long time. Pilots, however, are such a minority that noone really cares.

Now that everyone is impacted, regulation might get updated (or someone might spend the time to identify existing regulation that prohibits this), and that would extend to other vehicles than those with wheels.

yep!

There are so many people thinking "I did nothing wrong, who cares if I get tracked".... publish it all, and then have all the neighbours have access to that, the wife can see when you left the bar, your boss can see when you left, etc... only then will people be aware that it's not ok to do that.

There are also laws (not sure if accepted yet) that all cars should have remote shutdowns/blocks.. for "security reasons" (basically police can shut down your car if they want to)... and I'm just waiting for someone to hack the whole system and shut down all the cars around the world just for fun

Ideally other people shouldn't care what you do. But reality is sad

Even beyond nosyness, you might want your elderly parents to stay unaware that you’re checking retirement homes in their area. Or not let your son know you’re working a second job while he’s in college. Privacy is just so important from any angle we put it.

I don't particularly agree with both of your examples, but I share your opinion on the importance of privacy.

Citizen surveillance and corruption was the reason I started disliking cameras on public places.

I think the point is if this were public, we would end up with appropriate controls.

As it stands today, the only privacy that you have today in a vehicle is the amount of money it takes to get information from someone who runs a tow truck.

The police are mum, as the ever present LPR makes it trivial to track anyone. My buddy owns a local pizza place and has a bunch of cameras with LPR. He routinely provides data to the local PD. There’s no rule about it - he can give that info to me.

You can be sure that this information is collected and aggregated by many commercial entities and used to correlate where shoppers shop, where fleet cars go, etc.

I am not as optimistic.

Beyond individual camera data, there’s already huge amount of behavioral data you can legally buy (usually from tracking apps the users either willingly chose to use as such, or didn’t fully understand it what it would do) and probably associate with other databases to get individual profiles.

Even full on data breaches associated with complete identifying data have had very little impact on the control we have on them. The companies leaking millions of records didn’t get much more than a stern look and a slap on the wrist from regulators around the globe, and the EU is the only entity starting to take it seriously at this point.

"publish it all, and then have all the neighbours have access to that, the wife can see when you left the bar, your boss can see when you left, etc... only then will people be aware that it's not ok to do that."

If really everyone would participate, I would give it a try. Would disrupt a lot, but might end up with a honest society. But in reality, if you have money, you can circumvent tracking, in varius ways.

I believe it is also being done with planes today? People flying planes they control, even if they do not directly own it, so can not so easily be tracked.

So no, it is not ok, as it further increases the power imbalance. But with self driving cars and more and more sensors and safety regulations, it will likely come anyway.

> If really everyone would participate, I would give it a try

This isn't something you get to just temporality "try". Once it's a thing, it will always be a thing. No way is the government letting that one slip through their fingers.

Also, I'm envisioning a world where people are getting their retinas altered minority report style to avoid this.

> If really everyone would participate, I would give it a try. Would disrupt a lot, but might end up with a honest society.

Do you really want your health insurance company to know that you parked outside a doctor's office, who specializes in skin cancers? You just went for a check-up, but they might want to increase your payments or even cancel your coverage entirely.

Then good luck finding another insurance provider, since they all have that information now.

Or how about all future potential employers knowing that you once visited a union office?

There are so many cases, where people "who have nothing to hide" can't imagine where this could bite them in the future.

You (or your wife/daughter/girlfriend/secretary, etc.) visit a Planned Parenthood? Everyone - including your pastor - now has that info.

You go to a job interview at a competitor? Your boss now knows that.

We have no idea who or what groups who might want to snoop in where we park our cars.

The possibilities for abuse are endless. And as always, we have no way of predicting what use-cases unethical individuals will come up with as these things roll out.

Bad actors already have access to the data, right? Would it not be better to legalize/regulate it? I'm not convinced that we can put the genie back into the bottle.

Even if you did nothing wrong and "have nothing to hide"(TM), knowing where you are can also tell others where you aren't.

It gives the possibility to infer patterns from your travels, or can, for instance, give a thief the opportunity to rob your place knowing that you are 200 km away and won't be home any time soon.

Yeah, this will be normalized in about a year after some low budget government and corporate gaslighting.

People are already complicit with keeping a device in their pocket that passively tracks their location.

Tracking people on camera and making them okay with it is the logical next chapter in this privacy erosion saga.

This only holds true until you realize that crazy road rager on the highway can look up where you live and your children go to school

It's not even that pilots are a minority and that's why no one cares. It's that most air travel is commercial, and nobody cares if someone can see where exact UAL123 is at this moment. Nobody feels bad for some millionaire's private jet getting tracked, nobody feels bad for some expensive charter plane with $15k tickets getting tracked, and the only thing left is small GA aircraft, which nobody care about at all.

The pearl clutching from some pilots (not accusing you of this) around aircraft tracking, ADSB, etc., seems exceptionally silly to me.

> the only thing left is small GA aircraft, which nobody care about at all

Why does nobody care about those? Is it because they're a minority? Seems like you might be contradicting yourself?

You can probably count on one hand the number of people who care where a specific Cessna 172 is at any given point in time. What's contradictory about that?

In the UK, people who are annoyed by GA plane noise will look up the owner’s details (these are held in a mandatory, public database by the CAA, equivalent to the FAA) and contact them directly.

In Germany the aircraft registry is not public. But that's only a minor advantage. People who would need to look up my aircraft registration aren't usually interested when or where I'm flying. People who know me are interested. And they know anyway. Can't hide the license plate of my car from neighbors, can't hide the aircraft registration from family and friends.

If nobody cares where a Cessna is, why is it mandatory that everyone can find out? You could count on a fingerless glove the number of people who care where my car is, but I'd prefer not to stick that information in a public database. Some percentage of Cessna pilots prefer to keep that information private, and the rest can continue sharing that information regardless, so it would be a strictly positive-utility change. For what reason, other than the fact that Cessna pilots are a tiny minority, has this not been changed yet?

"flying is a privilege not a right", "you have no expectation of privacy in public," and "but we're safer from aircraft collisions etc and that justifies the reduced privacy" are what it boils down to. I'd be shocked if anything you here isn't a nuanced or refined way of saying one of those.

Life is a lot safer now, so ever more 'safe' things start to look dangerous. If you prefer liberty/privacy to safety you're quickly becoming a dinosaur and if necessary society will imprison you to make sure you don't interfere with democratic process of the majority.

> Nobody feels bad for some millionaire's private jet getting tracked

This might quickly change. Now people are somewhat routinely tracking millionaire's private jets and shaming them for what they perceive as inappropriate use. Given how the law correlates much more with the interests of the types of people owning private jets than with the interests of the average citizen, we might see attempts to get that outlawed.

The difference is that "person went from airport X to airport Y" is WAY less private than, say "person went to Planned Parenthood clinic" or "person parked in front of union"

I can definitely get behind this, being tracked is a solid disincentive to flying, this could work the same way for driving to promote more public transit/walkable cities. If this goes to facial tracking that's a whole different concern though.

I think the argument being made here is more that it's non-consensual data collection which seems solid. By owning a plane you're consenting to it being tracked and same for a car, but I don't think a person just using the plane/car/train/street should be allowed to be tracked - just the vehicle

My current feeling is that, at least in SF, no one cares about traffic laws. The roads are public and traffic laws exist to organize sharing of the roads. I think I'd prefer the roads to be surveilled and more fines be levied. I'm sick of watching people just run red lights, turn right on no-right-on-red lights, block lanes that are illegal to block, stop in places marked "no-stopping", drive down bus only lanes, cross double white "no crossing line" etc... These all put other people's health/lives in danger and need to be enforced IMO

I'm inclined to agree. They could enforce many more laws with automation, today. Car has distance sensors for cruise control? Monitor and report following distance. Speeding. Changing lanes without signaling. Etc.

the next level would have to be - who searched and what did they search for?

For most boats this is optional, but still most boats have AIS [0] as part of their comms and have it enabled. There are also several websites (like [1]) where you can locate any boat (with AIS) in the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste... [1] https://www.marinetraffic.com/

> Finally. Publish it all. Tracking of every vehicle, visible for everyone.

I'd have no problem with this as long as there was a flip side that said that I get a cryptographically secure feed of verified identities of everyone who accesses my data. Including if law enforcement accesses it.

As long as privacy is not a granted right that enables you to sue offenders, there's not much you can do. The EU has at least started to realize the issue but giving the speed of technology vs. the pace of administration, it might be a losing battle.

Rights grant you the ability to sue others?

Interesting take.

Sue others or the government. A right without a remedy isn't really a useful right.

I mean, it makes sense.

If you have the "right" to $THING, but you have no redress if someone denies you $THING, you don't really have a right to it.

For violating those rights? Yeah, I would think so...

The use of dash cams is effectively illegal in Austria on privacy grounds: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/152064/are-dash-c...

hilariously, most dashcams don't have the optical fidelity to read plates consistently anyhow.

And banning the use of dash cams also results in good drivers subsidizing bad drivers.

Supposed to be illegal in Portugal too. But I've been using different dashcams in Portugal for 6 or 7 years now, and nobody's ever commented on them.

This is a very foreign concept to me in the US. Even though I do think we have a right to privacy from the government, there's something to be said for allowing private citizens to record whatever they want in public.

"Your freedom ends where my nose begins."

At this point I’m carrying so many electronic devices with me or at home that I’ve give up on going out of my way to prevent getting tracked. My best effort is to trust Apple doesn’t sell me out.

What does Apple have to do with it here? The apps on your Apple device are exfiltrating data left and right every day - including parking apps which are the topic of this post.

Megacorporations aren't going to save you from this one. Actually creating regulation that will define where you're data is allowed to go (and stay) might.

I don’t think you (nor parent) read the actual post.

1. The problem presented is not that parking apps exfiltrate data from your phone, it’s that anyone can throw your plate number into it and get notified of when you pass through specific areas.

2. Your solution would not address the problem. Problem is not one of data portability, but the fact that your license plate may be registered in a system without your consent or awareness. The convenience of the service is directly at odds with privacy/security, and the post is asserting that the gain in convenience achieved through the current implementation is not worth the perils of the unfettered tracking possible through it. It provides non-governmental solutions to ameliorate the issue.

Apple has all the data at full precision. The few apps that are selling my data get the scraps of a Wi-Fi SSID here or there, and an IP address every once in a while.

This is how Apple comes into it.

Inspiring

> At this point I’m carrying so many electronic devices with me or at home that I’ve give up on going out of my way to prevent getting tracked

As much as I hate the guy, Kissinger made a great point in an interview with Eric Schmidt paraphrased:

'We have lived a fairly peaceful period in the last century with a stable world order, we should not assume that this is guaranteed to continue forever.'

We usually don't like to think in centuries or decades. But a democratic state today can become autocratic 50 years from now.

Equally, today caring about my privacy is just adding a lot of friction to me daily live. 50 years from now, I have no guarantee that myself or someone in my family becomes 'a person of interest' for my government.

I start to think that in an ordinary human lifetime it is more likely than not to experience disaster. If you were born in 1945 and are still alive today, you may have picked the most lucky period to have lived through of all possible. I am not concvinced the next 75 years will be as peaceful as the past 75.

I'm not sure how true that is. I think it's dependent on location really or country for conflicts. Some places have seen a lot of violence. Violent crime rates were pretty high in some areas too.

Yes I realize it is not a very general statement. Many places have experienced conflicts also during this period. But in average, I think it may still be true.

"Equally, today caring about my privacy is just adding a lot of friction to me daily live. 50 years from now, I have no guarantee that myself or someone in my family becomes 'a person of interest' for my government."

Careful there. Now you're sounding like you you don't want to obey the government/laws if you don't agree with what is created in the future. At least this has been the argument around many gun laws that create registries, quasi-registries, or release identity information publically, especially with the Overton window and rhetoric.

Edit: why disagree? Really, still no response? Isn't this the general play that is being mentioned in the prior comment - information gathered now can be used against them by the government in the future when the laws change or are ignored? Is this only an issue when it's applied to some people or topics but not others?

Yes. Second amendment supporters often make the same point.

> But a democratic state today can become autocratic 50 years from now.

It can happen in years, nevermind decades.

I was a bit bored in 2021 and going out a lot less than normal, so I had time to experiment with an Android phone using all open source privacy respecting apps. I managed to make it work, but it took quite a lot of my time and resources and definitely meant sacrificing some conveniences. Eventually, when I started going out and being more socially active again, it got to be too inconvenient for me, and I decided to switch to Apple and be less strict about it. While I did pick up some more careful privacy practices, I have no doubt that my location could easily be tracked by multiple parties. To be honest, it could probably have been tracked much of the time when I was going all out to avoid it too. If nothing else, cellular network operators can determine my position by which towers my SIM card is connecting to, and I have no illusions about that data being private. I'm sure that being tracked by Wifi networks, bluetooth and payment terminals is also happening all the time. I don't like that everyone is so trackable in the modern world. But avoiding it basically means opting out of all of these trackable technologies and living like a monk: no cell phones, no cars, no cashless payments, etc. How many people really want to make those sacrifices?

Thank you for elucidating my two liner. I was writing from a similar experience as yours. Now I believe I've reached a reasonable compromise between inconvenience and privacy. Minimise my data footprint in the private corporation space which means no Google (almost, YouTube and Maps are still hard to replace), Apple ecosystem with all sorts of anti-tracking setting turned on (Privacy relay, hide-my-email, and what not), nextdns, own my email domain + Fastmail.

Which means Apple has just about all the data about me over last ~3 years and so far they seem to be doing a good job of holding fort. Obviously if a state actor wants to screw me then well, all bets are off so I'm not going to guard myself against that as it's way too more inconvenient as you stated.

> Apple ecosystem with all sorts of anti-tracking setting turned on (Privacy relay, hide-my-email, and what not), nextdns, own my email domain + Fastmail.

The best way to increase privacy in the Apple ecosystem is to not use iCloud at all. Most of it (including your photos and backups, which contain endpoint keys and chat history) is effectively unencrypted and Apple can read all of it at any time without your device. Apple intentionally preserves this encryption backdoor in iMessage/Photos/iCloud for the US federal government, who can then access this information without a search warrant or probable cause.

This means creating a burner phone number, using that to create a burner Apple ID that is used only for installing apps, using only free apps (because the moment you put your payment card information in, you're deanonymized) and only using devices bought for cash.

Then Apple has a fair amount of information about you, but it's not linked to your identity.

Apple turns over customer data to the US federal authorities without a warrant over 30,000 times per year per their own transparency report. This is in addition to the normal legal process stuff that involves subpoenas or probable cause-based search warrants.

You're not wrong. And I'm no fan of government surveillance. But my own threat model isn't concerned with protecting myself against state actors. Simply put, I don't have the resources or time to be vigilant about that, so I'm writing it off as a lost cause. My threat model is to protect myself from advertisers and small players.

You think that state actors are the only one that also get this data set? lol.

The DB5 in Goldfinger (1964) had revolving licence plates.

A cursory Google search comes up with some shady websites that sell similar tech, but it would be a nice DIY project to make a licence plate screen that can be changed on the fly (e-ink based maybe).

Has anyone tried it?

SWIM has a leaf-shaped magnet that can be demagnetised via remote.

You put it on the plate so that it cannot be scanned but if police pulls you over it falls off.

What about https://reviver.com ?

This would be flagged immediately. Law enforcement cameras check the plate against the registered make, model, and colour (which are public record in the UK)

What happens if you paint your car? Are you supposed to inform your gov't?

Yes, actually, although generally speaking it's not widely enforced. Generally you won't get caught as long as the color on the registration matches the factory color in the VIN database, but you are supposed to ensure the vehicle description is accurate when you renew your registration and providing false information is a criminal offense, so if the color changes, you should update your vehicle registration.

yes

Yeah, you are.

Family member of mine actually got in trouble because the dealership typed the wrong color into the registration paperwork. The color on the registration didn't match the actual color of the car therefore it was considered illegally registered and the car was impounded during a routine traffic stop.

I love hearing these stories of "with all other crime being solved" officers have moved onto the petty stuff /s

Just pick up a plate number that matches your car; it's not like every car is unique. (But of course that would be harmful to the rightful owner of that registration number.)

Also, it's a little doubtful colors can be recognized in all light conditions (at night, in a tunnel, etc.)

And if the car is simply parked (vs. a road check), does it matter that it's "flagged"? What could happen? There would have to be a warning somewhere for the car to be impounded, or to send officers to wait for the owner to show up. Very unlikely IMHO.

A really good hack to get around the fact that motor vehicles are by law easily traceable is to...just take mass transit.

But when mass transit phases out paper tickets, "use the convenient app for a 20% discount!", it's not much better...

Even with paper tickets, if you paid with a credit card there's now a perfect record: Jim Smith got on at the Fruitvale station and got off in Fremont, stayed there two hours, and then came back the same way.

the old trick at the air port was to buy mulitple tickets leaving around the same time to different destinations at multiple airports ultimately traveling under false ID under a different name. that's surely feasible for pretty much anybody not just super spies, right?

Not anymore ... With facial recognition and passport/I'd databases?

face recognition is also a thing, though perhaps not as publicly accessible as a license plate

I remember a story of a guy who had his license plate on a hinge with a little cable attached to the cigarette lighter in the car. When he wanted to speed in an area with cameras he'd pull out the cigarette lighter to fold the plate up, then pop it back in to fold the plate down when he was finished. This struck me as a very neat solution, and nicely disguised too.

https://www.surreynowleader.com/news/golden-ears-toll-evader...

“Officers are always looking for uninsured vehicles,” said Surrey RCMP spokesman Cpl. Scotty Schumann. “The officer was very surprised when he saw a valid B.C. license plate magically lift into place after they had passed the toll cameras.”

That man deserves a medal for keeping that 1993 Geo Metro going.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1105/

the only time I saw this in real life was a twenty-something guy with a high powered street motorcycle. It was not stock and had odd parts (which makes other mods less obvious). I believe he had a kill switch for all lights on the bike, which made reading the plate at night more difficult, but the immediate use was to run from a hiway patrol when challenged. No idea how that worked out for him over time.

Hard to run away from an oncoming truck which didn't see you because you were running dark

well sure but if you are running a high powered street bike, the truck is only one of many immediate dangers..

I believe that license plates used to be made of metal with reflective coating and ridges (made by prison labor?) but today on the street I am seeing what looks like white paper with black lettering?

assuming the people here are not in general criminals, I'm not sure that committing a fake license plate crime is the best way to go about staying under the radar.

Just another reason to preference walking and cycling.

A bike is a great mode of transportation when you don't need to carry anything heavy, bulky, passengers etc. and when weather permits.

It's not a replacement for a vehicle, nor will it ever be.

Narrow thinking. Cargo bikes come in a variety of shapes and sizes to carry children, adults, parcels, moving boxes, and more. As for the weather... well, as we say in Denmark: there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

Denmark - max temp 72F/22C

Florida - max temp 100F/38C

Have fun biking in Florida, unless there is a shower ready for you at each end.

If you're doing something dressy, you need that shower anyway unless you're never spending more than a couple of minutes outside — or you dress appropriately for the weather and it's not an issue.

Florida is also an interesting example given that it's both the southernmost point of the continental United States and at significant risk of catastrophic damages from the climate change caused in no small part by driving cars. Whether or not you prefer the status quo, continuing it isn't an option.

>Florida is also an interesting example

oooh, now do Texas. Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Southern California

or, flip it. Do any of the states bordering Canada during winter.

I grew up in Southern California. You can bike year round, except for a couple of days a year when you have severe rain (which also floods a lot of roads) or wildfires. The primary reason people don’t are that the roads are unsafe by design and opposition to dense housing has pushed people into unsustainable lifestyles.

Minneapolis consistently has one of the highest rates of bike commuting of US cities.

Build the infrastructure and people ride bikes.

I believe you are discounting the fact that a shower is not always available at the place you are going. Take for example, you need to go to a job interview. I skip the shower at home, bike to the job interview, sweat profusely during the ride, and now I shower where exactly?

What about needing to go multiple places during the day? Should I now shower 4 times because I have 4 stops that require me to interface with people and appear clean?

Biking in Florida (substitute most of the southern US) for 7-8 months of the year is simply not possible unless it is acceptable to be a sweaty mess at each destination.

as we say in Denmark: there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

That's easy to say in Denmark, since the weather is virtually always pretty OK. It basically never gets below -10 or above +35. Without looking at the data I would guess 300ish days a year are between 5 and 25.

We use that expression in Iceland too

Yea, we use it Norway as well. However the expression really only works in cool-moderate climates. You can easily dress to be active and comfortable when it's -10 and snowing, you really can't for +40 and humid.

The Netherlands would like a word.

It only works for short trips. No one rides a bicycle if they have to go to another town, 50 miles away. Also, do not mention: "you can take your bicycle on a train" - if you need to use the train then again you are dependent on public service and traceable.

Passenger cars also don’t work for containers or industrial timber transport. No specific vehicle needs to fit every single use case, if your day to day life involves commuting from a town 50 miles away in the middle of nowhere, so be it.

More people live in cities than rural areas, but it doesn’t mean they’ll come to take away your car.

> It only works for short trips. No one rides a bicycle if they have to go to another town, 50 miles away.

1. Ride your bike into a train

2. Wait 20 minutes

3. Roll out of the train and ride into your destination

See, it isn't that hard. What part of this process requires you to be tracked? You don't need any ID to purchase train tickets.

> You don't need any ID to purchase train tickets.

The Netherlands would like a word ;)

Most people here have a public transport pass in their own name, linked to their bank account.

Is there no way to buy a train ticket without ID?

You can, in multiple ways: there's the standard single-fare train tickets that you can get from vending machines, but they carry a 1 euro surcharge over the normal fare (the paper cards still are RFID-enabled so people can open the boarding gates with them).

There's also the "anonymous" transport card that you can get for 7,50 and then pre-charge with a set amount. It will act as a pre-paid card rather than a debit card, so you can't board unless there's a sufficient amount stored on the card. But since most people then use a debit card to transfer money to their public transport card, it's not really anonymous anyway.

So most residents here choose the personal variant.

All vehicles have things that they are better or worse at, but you overstate the case against bicycles. For example, with passengers, you can add a child seat or trailer to an ordinary bike, or you can use a longer bike designed for bringing others.

Cars also have situations they're a poor fit for: places without good parking, if you have to take part of your journey by another mode (bus, train, etc...) and need your vehicle on the other end, if you can't afford them (including fuel, insurance, etc), if there aren't good roads, if you're too young, etc.

All vehicles are better at some things and worse at some things. That is why replacing all cars with bicycles won't work at all, and we should stop pushing this idea.

We just need to use more bicycles.

I don't see anyone here proposing replacing all cars with bicycles?

Or people with asthma or any number of other disabilities. Bike-centric design is transparently ableist.

> Bike-centric design is transparently ableist.

There are many disabilities which don't allow driving, not to mention that in countries like the United States which don't take care of people there are many disabled people who cannot afford to own a car.

Accessibility doesn't have a single solution but if you look at areas which are welcoming to bicyclists they are also much better for a wide variety of disabilities because they have things like sidewalks, safe vehicle speeds or limited vehicle access, curb cuts, etc. You'll see people in electric wheelchairs or tricycles using bike lanes/paths, blind/deaf people don't have to worry as much about getting hit by a speeding car they were unable to notice, etc.

If you don't like bicycling, think of them as safe mobility lanes — the users certainly do, and we should all back having more of them because if we're lucky we'll live long enough to need them.

Bullshit: a city designed around bikes is a city designed around wheelchairs.

Not to mention asthma never prevented anyone from cycling. Maybe you won't win the Tour, but you can definitely commute cycling with asthma if your city is designed around humans and not cars.

Asthma is an especially tragic claim since pollution from cars is believed to be responsible for millions of cases of asthma annually:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpla/article/PIIS2542-5...

Speak for yourself, if you can bike with asthma I'm happy for you. Mine is exercise-triggered and anything above a walk lays me right out. Being anything other than a pariah on a bike path requires a minimum level of energy output beyond what I can sustain. Or are you my doctor now?

It is possible to cycle with less effort than walking, even with a bike with no electrical assist, what I was saying is that you don't need to exert yourself. Maybe you consider that being a pariah, but that's how in cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen you see people cycling well into their 70s and 80s.

> Or people with asthma or any number of other disabilities. Bike-centric design is transparently ableist.

Don't recumbent electric trikes largely address this issue? Someone unable to operate one of those isn't very likely to be able to operate other types of (larger and faster) vehicles.

> A bike is a great mode of transportation when you don't need to carry anything heavy, bulky, passengers etc. and when weather permits.

My family uses our cargo bikes as our primary mode of transportation year round. It turns out that children were allowed to leave the house prior to the invention of cars and continue to be capable of wearing jackets in the winter. Many even like the snow.

The key thing to understand is that while sometimes you need more than a bike can carry, that's a small fraction of all of the vehicle trips Americans make. The average trip we take has 1.2 people in the car, is a relatively short (half of them are under 3 miles, a distance my son could do on his own as a 2 year old), and carries negligible cargo. Buying a vehicle for your 99th percentile needs is a significant expense for capacity you use only a handful of times a year — the average American spends $11k/year to own a car according to AAA, and for that much money you could buy and discard a new cargo bike every couple of months and still have plenty left over to rent a truck on the few occasions when you need landscaping or building supplies.

I don't really disagree with your points, but your usecase is nowhere near the norm where I live or how I live.

I'm perfectly fine with city dwellers having more bikes (if they so choose), whatever helps the traffic and parking in the cities.

My point still stands that in no way is a bike a replacement for all the utilities of a vehicle, whether you're offloading that by renting, borrowing, etc.

I'll drive my vehicle, you can ride your bike. The power of choice! No conflict needed.

Yes, choice is good - my point was simply that the vast majority of American vehicle miles traveled are not doing things which can only be done by a large, expensive car or truck. I suspect in the future we’re going so see a lot more electric LSVs, too, since an awful lot of trips don’t need to go over 30mph and saving $20-30k plus maintenance is appealing to a lot of people.

> the vast majority of American vehicle miles traveled are not doing things which can only be done by a large, expensive car or truck.

Source? People get cars because they need one. The first big thing you get for yourself is a car, because it's so useful.

I believe the opposite of your statement is true, biking is only really practical in a very limited bubble.

In North America in September of 2022, your statement is not wholly wrong. Building cities around the car is a privilege that NA cities have enjoyed in the decades of unparalleled prosperity and abundance that followed WWII.

However, we saw in just the past year the consequences of even a moderate increase in the cost of gas for the average American, how they reacted to it, and how they learned from it. From that, I think I can say with fair certainty that the American brand of city will not cope well with any meaningful shortage. There are other, longer term problems that will begin to show themselves as abundance wanes as well.

A car can only ever be as useful as the roads it drives on, and the same with a cargo bike. If there are copious protected bike lanes that go everywhere you want to go, you would bike everywhere in just the same way you drive everywhere today. The only difference between them is how they deal with black swan events that threaten the abundance that drives driving.

I'm not trying to be a doomer here, but most places can't (and likely none should) build expecting that they're always going to have the resources to sustain excess. This isn't a knock against you either, you don't always have a choice as to where you live and the means available to you to get around. However, it is worth being aware of the narrowness of this perspective.

That $11k/year figure is based on 15000 miles/year usage which is close to the average annual mileage per driver in the US.

Yes - I think we broke 14k miles on average last year, and I’d bet AAA’s membership skews above average since people who don’t depend on daily commutes are less likely to join.

https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...

A lot of people all over the world get by fine without a car. They have stores in walking distance so they don't need to buy in bulk. They can easily have things delivered and if they really need a car they can hire one for a few hours at a time.

>It's not a replacement for a vehicle, nor will it ever be.

The majority of my use of a vehicle was commuting to work. After that, it was shopping for groceries. I'm 2.5 years into having no vehicle. I'm 1.5 years into using a cargo bike. There are very few things that are not doable on my cargo bike as it is now. With a few DIY modifiations, I could narrow that even further. The remaining I can settle with ride shares from an app or even more old skool the use of friends.

Not really an option in cities with consistent 100+ F degree weather (e.g., Houston).

I just wish we spent 1/20th as much money in walking and cycling infrastructure as we do on car infrastructure.

When needed, pay taxis with cash, and use public transport with rotating bus cards. Only activate the burner SIM on your phone when really needed.

Do you call your taxi with an app? Or by a phone?

Flag them down in many places. If I need to call them, I activate the burner SIM and call with VOIP.

> Certain tollroad systems, such as France's Bip & Go télépéage, require a physical Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag to be present in the car for authentication purposes.

Only if you want to pass the toll / "télépéage" without having to stop for paying "manually" (using a credit card of whatever).

I've got one and now you can pass most tolls without stopping (but you need to slow down to about 30 km/h // 20 mph).

Transponders (not sure if it’s RFID per se) are common on toll highways in the US and can operate at full highway speeds. But at least with the system I’m familiar with (I-Pass in the Chicago area), if your transponder is broken or missing, they will correlate your license plate to your account via photo.

I recently took a Spanish rental car to Portugal for more than a month. I registered the license plate number and a credit card on the Portuguese tolls website.

I then used a bunch of toll highways that were "electronic only" and received the appropriate charges on my credit card a few days later.

I think if you're going to set up a toll system in the future, then this is the tech you're going to use. Not RFID or transponders. Just read the license plate and charge the user.

There were options, BTW, to pay in cash, with pre-paid cards, etc, that didn't directly tie your identity to the plate. But I assume the rental agency will tie me to the plate, so used my credit card anyway.

> I think if you're going to set up a toll system in the future, then this is the tech you're going to use. Not RFID or transponders. Just read the license plate and charge the user.

In my experience any tolling system set up in the past decade is this way. No worries about transponders, they just have a bunch of cameras over the lanes and then send you a bill. Works even for out-of-state plates.

In my country, the EasyPark app seems to have taken a lot of the market. Almost every parking space I see now has it as an option, including spaces owned by the city. Thankfully, they currently still support paying with cash, but machines often don't return change and only accept coins, so they can be inconvenient.

It's shocking to compare the privacy aspect of the app: instead of anonymously throwing some coins into a machine and putting a slip on your dashboard, the app needs: your phone number, your plate number, your credit card details and full GPS access. They're not hiding this: It's explained in their GDPR privacy notice that they track and store your phone location and travel routes even when you're not using a parking space.

On top of that, you also pay more for parking when using the app, since they take some percentage commission of the parking cost (apparently depending on your account options, but I never got far enough with the app to find this out)

Same in the UK with RingGo.

Uk has gdpr?

Yes. All EU law at the time of Brexit remains UK law unless and until it is explicitly revoked/superseded.

> They're not hiding this: It's explained in their GDPR privacy notice that they track and store your phone location and travel routes even when you're not using a parking space.

What you're describing sounds illegal. Under the GDPR they cannot collect personal information that's not strictly required for the service the customer is requesting. Unless they have express permission and the customer isn't denied service for refusing.

With the rise of automated license plate readers and tracking databases, we MUST recognize this truth: License Plates Considered Harmful (to privacy and 4th Amendment rights).

No, I'm not joking. If we're not going to put serious legal restrictions and penalties on this kind of tracking, the only other viable option is to eliminate license plates entirely.

Here in Austin, there is at least one sane City Councilman who is pushing for a maximum 3 minute retention time for license plate scan event data. I expect that would get pushed to 30-180 minutes in reality, but there is no justification for any longer than that...

I'm surprised my idea from 10 yrs ago hasn't been monetized. It was an lcd cover that could be made in license plate size, with a remote controller which could dim/darken/blackout the cover. Or in Deluxe mode, activate lines randomly which would result in a different number. Then again... somebody is out front in this technology space. https://www.newsweek.com/what-are-digital-license-plates-how...

I have seen a video of someone doing just this on a car. I'm not sure if it was a commercial product or if it was something they hacked together.

I’m not. You’re describing a spectrum from a traffic ticket in some states (CA will cite you for darkening) to a misdemeanor or even a felony for falsifying or obscuring your license plate. Yes, you can still buy darkeners in the areas they’re illegal, but nobody is going to invest in developing a misdemeanor machine for sale. There’s a difference between a sheet of dark plastic and an engineered device.

The digital plates thought of this in their design. You can think of them as frontend UIs for your jurisdiction’s motor vehicle authority, even though a private company is working on them. They will snitch when your tags lapse, both visually and electronically (that’s their purpose), and won’t let you do what you’re proposing if they’re designed correctly.

maybe because the device could subject both the buyer and the seller to criminal prosecution?

I'm not surprised, it sounds illegal for the purpose you described. It's illegal just to own plate flipping devices without even using them in some states. Surely that would be too.

> A person commits an offense if the person with criminal negligence uses, purchases, possesses, manufactures, sells, offers to sell, or otherwise distributes a license plate flipper. An offense under this subsection is a Class C misdemeanor, except that the offense is a Class B misdemeanor if the person has previously been convicted of an offense under this subsection.

https://law.onecle.com/texas/transportation/504.947.html

My intended used was for parked vehicles. Not to avoid moving violations.

I'm sure whoever makes plate flippers claims the same intended use.

edit - Found some for motorcycles on ebay...."Ideal for track days/shows/meets etc.." along with "FOR OFF ROAD USE ONLY" on the listings.

This came up in a thread elsewhere about the severe increase in vehicle thefts in the Portland area. These thefts are not actively investigated by the police, so it would be nice if the owner of a vehicle could get relevant data for the movement/location of the stolen vehicle.

Anybody here ever worked with their local PD to get access to the ALPR data? Seems like the work to do it would be more political/bureaucratic than technical.

We tried and failed, but it was not ALPR data.

I came to the conclusion that the data is only available to defend the well connected, or to persecute their enemies (at least in the US).

I think the creation of mass tracking databases should be illegal.

Barring that, every single person should have equal access to it. (Perhaps gated behind filing a police report and swearing it is correct under penalty of perjury.)

Yeah, the thought was that after filing a police report one could track just the related vehicle.

Agreed on the dismal assessments, but those DBs are going to be created and we might as well extract some value as citizens.

Would you mind summarizing your attempt and any lessons learned (other than the disappointment mentioned)?

The details are kind of boring and out of date.

We were repeated victims of minor property crimes. The police spent maybe 5-10 officer hours investigating, which is more than I expected.

However, they failed to run a (unusual for them, but legal) database search that would have almost certainly identified the culprits.

I think they would have done it if the crime was higher priority for them, but ultimately, they need to prioritize their resources on serious crimes and things that make for good public relations / internal politics (like if we were friends with the mayor or something).

As the victims, we had every incentive to pursue the investigation, but no legal ability to do so.

I'm well aware that our experience was far, far better than is typical in, say SF or Oakland. In our case, they probably would have made an arrest if we had a positive identification of the criminal.

That's not really the case everywhere, which is a separate issue.

Theoretically, could this same principle be borrowed by the open source community… to create a database that tracks and updates the location of police, government, military, and high status individual vehicles?

I’m thinking of a decentralized, Web3, IPFS-like distributed database, but instead of file storage, it’s real-time geolocation with OSM on the backend.

Yes technically, as long as you know the license plates, but how often do those vehicles park in a commercial places like that? I don't think they do often enough for this kind of tracking to be useful

Good point. It would become dramatically more useful if netizens just ran license plate scanners on their dashboards that regular report the timestamped geodata of marked/government vehicles.

Would the solution no be to simply allow people to pay for parking twice? There's already nothing stopping you from getting two parking slips at a machine. Just start another parking session for each user and track them independently.

Don't be fooled. The purpose of mass surveillance has always been coercion. If you can't see how this is going to be abused just give it a bit more thought.

What happens if I fill out the form BUT I am an easypark user? Does it delete my account?

I remember the police claiming they had this tech (license plate recognition) for average speed tracking while it did not work. It also didn’t work but was claimed to work for some toll roads. It helped as people slowed down and paid toll but it didn’t work; it started working years after installing it.

I am not supposed to ask on HN but why the downvotes? It’s just an observation from the past (Over 20 years ago)?

It's self-contradictory and hard to understand.

How self contradictory? Most people believed it worked and slowed down, but driving too fast never got you fined because it didn’t actually recognise your number plate. Unlike normal speed cams which were manual at the time.

> it didn’t work; it started working years after installing it.

Nothing personal, it is just not very well phrased and I think you confused a lot of people with the first version.

Fair enough!

It could be easily fixed by having to get a physical OTP from an automated kiosk in the car park to add the license plate to the app.

super easy and user friendly. Easy to rollout, to keep a working supply-chain for the physical OTP...

Also known as the ever-lasting tension between security and usability.

To protect privacy, I would support an understandable degradation of usability.

As soon as you put a huge identification plate on your vehicle there’s no expectation of privacy.

That depends. We could set standards for what information is linked to that plate and to whom it is accessible. (My state actually has a standard for some info which should not be tied to a plate, but they do it anyways. But nobody is going to stop them. I brought it up to the AG's office, but they were complete idiots about it)

One could also set up an anonymous LLC and register the vehicle that way if they really cared.

I didn't put them on there, they already were there when I picked the car up. And every time I try taking them off people get angry at me.

There’s always a point where the amount of data makes it a different thing altogether. Like the difference between hearing random strangers talking on the street, and have a full record of everything that person said outside their home for the past 5 years.

That's the reason you only ever leave your house in a niqaab, I gather?

As soon as you’re birthed in a hospital and issued a birth certificate there’s no expectation of privacy.

Unless you’re an off-the-grid baby [0].

[0] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-to-have-an-unregistered-of...

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