Data brokers selling license plate location and analytics data
tlo.com
tlo.com
The wife charged their Chevy Bolt at work, which had a paid 'public' charger at her work site. The wife charged everyday and left it there so it could maintain battery and AC if she wanted. The chargepoint app shows the last vehicle that charged there, and a history of the last few days.
He checked her works charger histories, and noticed over a few weeks that on days she said she was still at work, the car wasn't showing on ChargePoint. He knew she was a charging fanatic. He drove to the work once. Verified she wasnt there. Called her and talked to her about how her work day is going. She pretended like she was at the actual office. She wasnt. At that point he knew, but took a few more days to fully get proof.
It's 'technically' anonymous, unless you have a clue about who has what car and where they charge.
And the TLAs aren't interested in selling this info to state and local agencies, while that's probably the bigger dollar for private businesses.
The revolving door works in both directions.
This is just as clear a violation of the 4th amendment as the multi-billion dollar goggle empire.
But nobody really cares about that do they? Laws are routinely enforced or ignored based on which option allows the largest profits for incumbents.
The police have huge networks. Almost all speed and red light cameras record 7-30 days of continuous video. Typically those installations cover most entry and exit points of a city. The DEA operates interstate surveillance on drug corridors. There are LPR hits and driver/passenger pictures from Maine to Miami, for example. All legal because driving is a privilege, and you don’t have a right to privacy in public.
"Driving is a privilege" is a slogan created by authoritarians. The word "driving" doesn't appear in the constitution one way or the other. Travel is a right.
The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or some other pre-automobile mode of transport. For that to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?
Walking is a right, sure.
Driving a car is a reasonable parallel to pulling a carriage with a horse, sure.
Driving or carriages are akin to walking? No.
Everybody might have the right to walk that no one can take away from them, but everybody doesn't automatically have the right to a horse and the land required to support and feed that horse, to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away, etc.
Some means of travel have wider social consequences, costs to the commons, that need to be addressed.
EDIT: Original versin of AnthonyMouse comment specifically mentioned a right to a horse and carriage.
The analogy would then be that driving is the modern equivalent of walking or drawing a carriage with a horse, even if cars didn't exist 200 years ago. For this to be relevant you would then have to be making the case that driving is only a privilege and not a right because walking is only a privilege and not a right. Which you're not actually claiming, are you?No one is claiming that you have a right to have someone else buy you a car or a horse, any more than you have a right to have someone else buy you a radio station.
> to travel through a city with a horse on a daily basis without having to contribute back to the very real piles of horse shit a day in the hundred of tonnes that needs to be cleaned away
Ordinances that require you to clean up after your animal or have emissions controls on your car are orthogonal to whether you have a right to operate one in general.
When you store paper in a self-storage shed, the police need a warrant. If you store a PDF on a shared electronic system, often it’s just a subpoena.
Google “third party doctrine” and the “Stored Communications Act”
The constitution is a piece of paper; it’s not internally consistent and not even rational.
You’re free to walk
True. The license to do so is a voluntary contract with State which persons may or may not sign. Alternatively, avoid "motor vehicle", and don't use words they regulate such as "operator".
Anyone in USA is free to travel in a personal conveyance for non-commercial purposes while respecting property rights of others.
> driving is a privilege
Commercial licensure of that regulated activity using those words is a privilege.
Driving is not a privilege. Anyone with funds may purchase a vehicle and drive it on private property.
Making use of roads paved by the public (through tax dollars) is a privilege. If you've failed to support the creation and upkeep of that road (by failing to pay registration- and license-related taxes) and failed to meet the minimum requirements (license, registration, vehicle insurance or a waiver, sometimes vehicle inspections, etc....) of the body that built and upkeeps that road (a governing body: local, state, or federal), you don't have permission (and you certainly don't have a right) to drive on that road.
Even if that's not the way it "should be" (expressing no opinion here), it's the way the law enforcement and judicial branches will enforce the rules of the road on you. Sovereign citizen(-adjacent, perhaps) BS like this is only likely to escalate a traffic stop and aggravate a judge. If you don't like jail, I recommend against this line of action.
But this is where we get into trouble, because then the same logic would apply to walking on public roads.
And the only ingress or egress to the vast majority of residences is a public road. Otherwise the place where nearly anybody lives is fully enclosed by someone else's private property.
At which point this claim becomes "leaving your house or going back home is a privilege" which is facially unreasonable.
It also doesn't align with the way we talk about anything else. If you fail to pay your taxes you don't lose your right to a jury trial just because juries are funded by taxes. If the jury convicts you of tax evasion and the government puts you in jail, the warden will search your cell whenever he wants, but we don't say "privacy is a privilege, not a right" or claim that the government can revoke this "privilege" without due process and conviction of a crime.
And you can't get out of this by saying "but you could just walk," because in many cases you can't. The path between many locations is accessible only via limited access highway where walking is actually prohibited. It's the rule rather than the exception for the distance to be prohibitive -- it isn't reasonable to walk from one city to another, regardless of whether or not it is physically possible.
After all, voting is a right, and if I cannot be at the polling place, I'm entited to vote by absentee ballot. They don't even require a stamp!
Walking is equivalent to breathing, whereas driving a car is at best equivalent to riding a horse.
If you get a benefit from licensure then you should voluntarily contract with the State so you can get whatever benefits are in the licensure contract.
Traveling by personal conveyance is a right. I'm not engaged in plumbing or electrical businesses so I don't take those licenses. Same for driving. I am licensed for septic installation.
At the end of the day, because the ability to drive is a function of competence and skill, it cannot be a right. Our ancestors in the 1890-1920 period weren't wild-eyed socialists - they lived through the early days with no rules.
Can a function of competence and skill not be a right? How do you square this with the first and second amendments, for example?
With the first amendment, competence and skill don’t apply. Anyone can express themselves, assemble, complain to the government or hand out manifestos, including ignorant or stupid people. I can go start a religion and exercise all sorts of bizarre practices without approval or reprisal.
Liability is always a thing. Your physical harm to people or property is separate from the scope of a fishing license or some other State contract such as a driver license.
Did the founding fathers anticipate a situation where everyone, everywhere, in public, was being surveilled, ceaselessly, in a fashion that allowed automated tools to pick out individuals, but at basically zero cost?
"No reasonable expectation of privacy" presupposes that the potential invaders of said privacy are actual living human beings, who have to be paid for their time, and thus have to sleep, eat, excrete, blink, etc. They cannot be on the job 100% of the time without incurring considerable cost. Previously, perfectly tailing someone 100% of the time was reserved for the most valuable of targets. Now it can be affordably used on somebody with overdue parking tickets. Or whomever the summer intern at one of these shops decides is cute and has an easy-to-remember license plate.
"In the private sector everything is allowed, except those that are explicitly prohibited. In the public sector everything is prohibited, except those that are explicitly allowed."
This is why in the EU (which is not a perfect society, but 'good enough'/'better than others' we got GDPR and EUDPR which cannot and should not be ignored.
If you allow the public sector to go rogue, then freedoms and right will be corroded and eventually taken away 'for our sake'.
Unless I am missing something really obvious, this is deeply mistaken. I would be very interested, for example, on your take on Carpenter v. US.
It does go on to talk about Warrants which are government instruments, and I agree that taking pictures of licence plates on public roads would not be a violation anyway.
But you can't argue that because I'm a private person, or that because TransUnion is not the government, that it's legal for us to go searching through peoples houses or papers or effects.
There are lots of other laws you’d have to worry about if you were trying to investigate somebody. Trespassing/breaking and entering for example.
Anyway, license plate info isn't considered a search because it's in public, and the SCOTUS doesn't care about how scale makes what used to be tolerable, a very different beast.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/how-law-enforcement-ar...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/auto...
There are always individuals and likely groups at TLAs who don’t have what most people would consider normal morals and/or think the ends justify the means. The CIA has been found to kill, torture, defame, bribe, and work with criminal organizations and enemy states to meet their ends consistently since their inception. Starting a company or organizing parties to create a company to satisfy legal requirements is about the least controversial thing they could do.
"... restrict public access of their residence address in tax appraisal records..."
If they took a mortgage on property, the document with their name is usually recorded by county clerk and recorder.
Preposterous!
cough
https://www.engadget.com/fbi-anom-phone-arcaneos-180523267.h...
The ACLU issued a report on how ALPR devices are used to track people in July 2013 (1).
Flock Safety (2) was founded in 2017 and has raised $381M from name-brand VCs like Tiger Global and A16Z. The ACLU raised concerns about them a year ago in a report. (3)
No one has been keeping it secret.
1: https://www.aclu.org/documents/you-are-being-tracked-how-lic...
2: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/flock-safety
3: https://www.aclu.org/report/fast-growing-company-flock-build...
That's what, Cory Hutcheson, ex-Sheriff of Mississippi County, MO, is accused of doing; prosecutors say that for three years, Hutcheson abused Securus's system to track all kinds of people — even a local judge — without a warrant. https://boingboing.net/2018/05/12/extraordinary-access.html
While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide. https://nyti.ms/450FPqK
U.S. Marshal Adrian O. Pena allegedly abused the Securus system by simply uploading blank documents and pretending he had authority to track people he had personal relationships with and their spouses. https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bqew/us-marshal-securus-ph...
I think there are basically two questions here:
1. Whether this kind of unrestricted bulk data collection (i.e., mass survaillence) should be allowed in the first place.
2. If it is allowed (presumably because the benefits outweigh the downsides, which isn't my opinion), what controls exist to access the data, what oversight exists, and who enforces it.
The current state of things is basically a free-for-all, where any collection goes, police often work in the shadow, and corporations get, at most, a slap in the wrist.
And generally I feel it's a valid argument, but it exposes two root problems:
1) Scale: There is a clear difference between a single person photographing license plates in a parking lot, or even a single person following one car, compared to an enterprise industrializing that tracking process through wholesale procuring of security camera footage or similar.
2) Linkage: Even if your license plate can be tracked, why should it be linked to your identity? The answer is that it really shouldn't. Of course you can register your vehicle to an LLC, but even if you don't do that, you shouldn't expect anyone on the road to map your license plate to your address. But again we return to the problem of scale, because ultimately someone could see your car in your driveway, then see it on the road, and therefore know your starting location and current location.
The first problem of scale, while clearly exposing an obvious difference, doesn't seem easily resolvable to me, because at what point is a process "industrialized?" How do you legislate against this without imposing on constitutionally protected activity, or at least basic pseudo-freedoms like freedom of commerce? And how do you avoid regulatory capture granting carve outs to a few anointed large corporations to continue the practice, especially if they're the same corporations that "contract" with the government? [One side-problem/solution here is the lack of transparency of, or restrictions on, government purchasing "public" data.]
The second problem of linkage, seems more easily addressable (no pun intended). States should put more protections on license plate databases, and make it easier for people to register their vehicle through a proxy, even without needing to create an LLC. But you still have the problem of "manual" linkage using photos of driveways.
But the larger, perhaps root issue, is that modern technology is exposing a middle ground between "private" and "public" (meta)data - we see this with enterprise-scale tracking of public information, and also with "personal data" shared with limited audiences on social media sites, where it's obviously not private because you intend to share it with people, but you also don't intend to share it with everyone.
When they are wrong, and people get arrested, go to jail, or pay thousands in legal fees to clear themselves...there is no accountability. Sometimes, the law enforcement who use the systems rely ONLY on these systems, not on the underlyer data (e.g. images) to validate an arrest.
Minimally, the services should have to produce an original image/video when surfacing information that will be used for legal action. Secondly, the services should be held financially responsible for legal costs when mistakes are made.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recogni...
Even better would be an image that is cryptographically signed by the sensor that captured it.
20+ years ago it really wasn't hard to be private in a public space. You walk off the main street and if you couldn't see anyone then no one could see you, generally. Same would be true about audio.
But today there's cameras everywhere and microphones everywhere, so privacy is not verifiable by simple observation. Plus, you have a GPS tracker on you that's talking to all the GPS trackers that's on everybody else.
That's where the logic breaks down, but it requires subtly and a bit more nuance because the way we're tracked is covert and not as obvious. It can be automated and doesn't require someone to physically follow you. It can gather way more information that that person physically following you every could.
It's not that the former logic was bad, it's that it works on a certain set of assumptions. Assumptions that don't hold true today. The problem we face today with a lot of arguments we have (more than privacy) is that people tend to be working under different assumptions, assuming everyone else has equivalent ones. Additionally, our assumptions are frequently wrong and we end up fighting rather than discussion, which it's fine to disagree with.
Instead of the "real" number, change the plate every 5 minutes using some sort of OTP algorithm. Makes it impossible for anyone with a camera to put together a location database, but the car is still identifiable by law enforcement if necessary.
> "In addition to the flexibility of the display, the digital plates also sport a tracking device that will alert the police to the location of a stolen vehicle and allow for general vehicle tracking. While a lot of people can get behind the idea of never going to the DMV again, not a lot of people are thrilled about the whole “license plate as tracking device” angle"
From: https://www.reviewgeek.com/4225/california-unveils-new-e-ink...
EDIT: I wonder why you got downvoted. I've recently been seeing a lot of downvoted comments that there's little conceivable reason to downvote, so I wonder if downvoting is a new way of trolling.
That doesn't sound like a drawback, I can understand the public benefit of the police being able to look me up by license plate number but not for the average citizen being able to do the same. This is separate from the issue that there should be stricter limits on law enforcement use of the data.
To the parent comments point, I have noticed more downvotes on valid but disagreeable comments recently, I think there might be some weight to it anecdotally.
You tell the police you saw the car with plate 2XYZ345 do a hit on run and give a time range. The state would have the seeds in its plate owner database and could generate a list of all cars that had 2XYZ345 sometime in that time range.
Isn't it LEO that's deploying most of these systems? At least around here, *MOST* of the motorola cameras I see are on public roads / traffic signals. Bit of google shows EFF and other orgs FOIA-ing various counties in CA and a lot of them got federal money for their police to install them...
"Now, you go from a crime in progress to instantly find the suspect when you search by:
Visual Evidence
- Vehicle make, type, and color
- License plate (missing plate, covered plate, state of the license plate)
- Unique features (roof rack, bumper stickers, and window stickers)
- Contextual Evidence
Timestamp
- Number of times this vehicle has been seen in the last 30 days
- Associated vehicles"
"Neighborhoods and businesses can download vehicular evidence, get a case number, and give it to the assigned detective. Vehicle data and license plates are the most requested piece of evidence.
If a known stolen vehicle or wanted person enters the community, local police will instantly get an alert on their cell phone or laptop. Up to 60% of stolen vehicles are associated with additional crime."
"With the Flock Safety network, your [law enforcement] agency is not limited to cameras you own — connect and collaborate with adjacent agencies and nearby privately-owned cameras in neighborhoods to extend your reach and multiply your search capacity."
First, let me laugh at the idea that state and local LE could technologically do anything that the public is unable to do.
Second, let me cringe at the idea that it's OK for the government to stalk individuals.
These have long been things overlooked by the “who needs privacy” crowd but they’re what’s most important.
There’s plenty of precedent for similar laws. Credit reports are another form of aggregating information about you that comes from other people’s reporting and it’s extremely circumscribed.
You can’t keep files on what people think of my credit history without following very very detailed rules, as well as being strictly liable in private action for breaking any of the rules even by small technicalities.
We can outlaw this if we want. Or restrict it heavily.
I’m tired of listening to arguments that we can’t regulate commerce. It’s just learned helplessness after listening to generations of corporate lobbying.
Exactly. We don't need to go on some moral and ethical odyssey to discover where the line is. We can just draw a line and say "thats the line." The notion that we must be fair and equitable to business and commerce is tiring. No, we don't.
You're going to have to do a lot of work if you want to pass such a law.
What's that got to do with anything? The point I'm making, of course, is that "fuck these people" is the right way to think about it.
There's no human right to make money off selling license plate data or something. People can find another business model or something else to do with their lives. Fuck them, and fuck their consumer privacy invading businesses.
Not if you have a government provided license, i.e. for private investigators.
It looks like harassment, quacks like harassment, but the government got their money so they've said it's not harassment.
Bicycles get a double plus as you do not even tap into a system, nor have a license plate.
Nobody seems to care.
License plates were originally sold in a time before mass surveillance, when they didn't constitute a de facto tracking device. Now they do constitute a tracking device, but you're still required by law to carry one wherever you go.
And that's the thing we need to fix, because nobody should have this data. Not corporations, not the government, and not the criminals and foreign governments who are going to violate whatever law you propose to solve this in some way other than removing the legal requirement to carry a tracking device.
And do note that we have some precedence for understanding how legal actions can become illegal by magnitude with the offence of stalking. Taking pictures of people in public is generally legal, but repeatedly targeting the same person is in many cases not
How long is it before anyone can find out the location of anyone else in real time? It's usually only a matter of time before things like this drop in price and become consumer tools, which is a scary proposition (not to downplay how scary it is already.)
...wait...
I haven't thought too much about why documenting these would be useful, but on top of my mind I could get answer of these questions: - have I seen this fancy/unique looking car in the past? - is this the same douche bag that I saw last week who can't drive? - what's the last CA plate number starts with now? Is it 9G or 9H? - are there more people driving w/ a 9[A-Z] plate in my town? (As a proxy of knowing how many people are still buying new cars in my town)
Police cars with ANPR presumably have a camera with a slightly more zoomed-in view. I don't know.
Sixteen+ years ago when making demo plate recognition systems for mobile use, the "cameras" were good lenses onto industrial machine vision processing arrays.
Light sensor cells backed by neighbourhood array processing hardware that was uploaded with a series of filters -
anti jiggle filter to reduce vibration effects so that successive frames "stacked" correctly and the ROI (region of interest) didn't wobble,
Then a ROI search to best guess "back end" of vehicle and licence plate location
sharpness filters to enhance letter against plate contrast
letter + digit "trained" filters that were primed to do the best match
The output was dejiggled "smoothed" images (ie nearly raw made up of rolling average of a few successive frames == good clear slighly processed image) + "best match" image (previous smoothed image + sharpened + overlaid best guess letter shapes) + text output of guessed licence plate.
All that worked pretty well - that was my last contact with that specific job, I was doing a lot of speculative contract work for a machine vision specialist supplier at the time.
honestly the hard part is remembering to take the SD card out every night and put it into a computer inside.
and then I thought maybe I can hook up a raspberry pi and put the sd card in it and have it upload via wifi
but then it's a lot of work for no clear benefit
https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-surveillance-detection-sco...
Individuals are generally unaware this even exists. Even if they are, few are willing to fight it; and even if they are, there's hardly anything an individual can do to change this.
Regulation needs to exist to prevent this, but considering governments are likely also using this data, and that lawmakers are in bed with lobbyists, the chances of that happening are also slim.
That cash bond is good for the driver to drive any car.
Of course it is only in lieu of liability insurance.
State DMVs are ultra-obsessive about tying an individual to every vehicle.
The way ALPR systems typically work is that there's a camera running OCR against rectangular objects in frame. What you're asking is whether there's a way for a only human eyes to be able to see the plate. That doesn't exist for obvious reasons. Products that attempt to do this anyway usually try to reduce viewing angles or blur things, but these aren't very effective strategies.
Furthermore, obscuring your license plate for any reason is illegal in every jurisdiction.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/customs-border-protecti...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-wit...
When doing a search very few of the hits I've seen have been from vehicle mounted cameras.
There are tons of private collectors, but lots of LE agencies are doing it too.
A good 90% of hits are from one of two sources: fixed traffic installations and parking garages. Maybe 10 years ago repo companies would put them on trucks and drive around mall parking lots, but the return was so low most scrapped them.
The privacy violation isn't really in the camera, or the telemetry, or any other data point you generate that is collected. It's in the combining of all of these things into a profile.
"New Tool Shows if Your Car Might Be Tracking You, Selling Your Data": https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-sel...
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...
Quick research says that license plate covers are "Allowed" in just 16/50 states, though I have no idea how accurate the source is and it also says that the "Allowed" designation "only" means that that that state requires license plates to be easily readable. (One of the table rows is "Arizona: Arizona | Arizona", so perhaps it's not very accurate.)
Still, regardless of how reliable the sources I found are, I'd be shocked to find many states that don't have prohibitions on making it difficult for red-light/speed/ALPR cameras to read plates.
It is insane that I can get accused of an infringement by a piece of software. I have the right to face my accuser in court. Who are you going to put on the stand? The camera? The CEO of Gatso?
ALPR is done for turnpikes & some HOAs are deploying them to track who comes in and goes out.
While I don't condone getting a cover for the purpose of avoiding taxes on turnpikes, I do condone them for avoiding ALPRs to avoid private companies from tracking me.