My family recently went to an amusement park.
As we drove in, I saw what looked like a license plate reader camera on the inbound gate to the parking.
On the way out, we pull up to pay at the automated gate kiosk and my wife says: "Oh wow! How did they know how long we've been here??"
I answered: "Because they scanned our plate on the way in and now when we pulled into the exit gate"
Part of me thought this was cool (automation!), part of me thought "well, there is no expectation of privacy since we are in public" and part of me thought "this is very big brother but done by private companies"
On the other hand, if the data is being sold to a data aggregator that is troubling. We see lots of surprising things like this, for example weather apps selling your location data.
This is why we need better data protection rights. GDPR has a lot of good ideas (though implementation was painful). CCPA should be strengthened.
Ideally we’d get a federal law limiting data collection without consent. (The optimist in me thinks this could be bipartisan.)
You can just think things are creepy without being a crime
edit: i guess the difference is you're not selling them the picture, you're providing it for free.
On the other hand, if there’s no way to connect a person to a license plate number without access to the DMV database, then that is not obviously an issue.
What I drive are owned by trusts and LLCs, so on paper they are not connected to my driver license nor to me.
While I understand that cars are designed to be mobile and therefore easy to move around when stolen, I don't understand the necessity of a big plate with unique numbers. I don't have that on my bicycles.
If plates reduce theft, let the insurance companies and manufacturers work that out.
They are publicly available data. If the license plate is associated with OTHER PII it becomes a problem. However reading your license plate on the way into and out of a garage is just reading a publicly available code at different times of day. The fact that that code must always be displayed on your vehicle, and can be tied to your identity is an issue, but the code itself doesn't constitute PII.
Plate info is not public to average Jane and Joe.
In a State in USA I tried to get owner info of a plate marked 'gvt' and was denied because DMV said I'm not a private investigator or something.
They're an inappropriate solution to the technical problem they were invented for now that the internet exists. It used to be that police had limited ways to verify ownership of a vehicle, and a simple state owned database with state issued numbers was a useful tool to solve this problem.
Now.. the police have internet connected mobile terminals. I'm not sure a "number plate" is the right solution to any part of this problem anymore.
Without license plates how are they to tell what that terminal is connect to which white Ford Bronco they are inquiring about? Do they have to actually stop every white Ford Bronco they see so they can read the VIN or get the driver's ID?
The plate numbers are the least likely to be correct and the least likely mechanism of finding the vehicle in question. The plate number will help you discriminate between two vehicles, but it does not aid in the search. Likewise police helicopters have no problem following specific vehicles even though the plates cannot be read.
So, you are imagining a situation where there are two identical suspects that cannot be discriminated from each other using all the above information and it will somehow come down to the plate, and without it, police will be unable to proceed correctly?
Is this actually any different from a suspect on foot or a bicycle or skateboard?
There's this disease within the tech community where people can't see the harm of scaling things up using automation. Potentially harmful thing X, previously moderated and slowed by the high cost of labor to do it at scale, must not be harmful because we've always technically allowed it, so therefore we should not do anything to moderate it now that robots are doing it for us. "We could run this nuclear reaction at a much faster rate if we just removed the moderator, what could go wrong?"
If you don't pay for the property, and you refuse to work out an agreement with the owner, they are entitled to come get their property. How is there additional harm, at this point, by using ALPRs to find the (effectively) stolen property?
It's not as if these things happen suddenly, either. There's months of effort by the lender to try to get you back on track. Repossession comes with risk, and it always comes with a fee. No one is eager to do this.
Not quite true. Buy here pay here dealerships and similar are absolutely eager to do this, and will go out of their way to make it onerous to pay what is owed, so they can sell the same 5 year old Kia for $15K multiple times over.
I'm not even upset about that. Hell, it might be a net good, I dunno.
The thing that I'm concerned about is that there is no guarantee (or even guard rail, really) against selling that data to a law enforcement organization that would otherwise have to undergo judicial scrutiny to get that data. What happens when some hacker gets a hold of their license plate database and uses it for an actual stalking operation? Or who knows what else?
At that point you have the right to ask them to delete their copy of the license plate record that they've certainly already sold on to a network of dozens of fly-by-night data brokers, malicious foreign governments, the police, and so on.
Shotgunning the request to the major players may not give 100% coverage, but I think it would at least reduce the amount of identifying information out there which seems like it would be better than status quo.
I'm curious if anyone has tried this at all.
Opt-in is the only way to make this work, and that's why it will never get passed.