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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Your location isn't that big a deal. They can easily get that from License Plate Readers.

What will be interesting, is if they ever use the data to give you tickets. I know that there was a discussion of a plan to use the New Jersey Turnpike tollbooths/EZ-Pass to judge speed between two points, and mail you a ticket. I don't think it ever made it out of the starting gate.

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It's a lot more precise data, and getting it from private companies without a warrant makes the bar potentially quite low.

My concern is more that it's ripe for parallel construction in cases that otherwise wouldn't make it out of the gate.

From what I understand, LPRs are very precise; especially the car-mounted ones that I see around here.

The biggest issue with LPRs, is the private corporations that run the infrastructure, sell the data to non-law enforcement people.

Basically, license plates were designed to give authorities the ability to match the car with an owner, and are designed to be public, but the matching data is supposed to be behind a lock. LPRs simply supercharge the collection of the data, but they have contracted out the matching, and those contractors seem to be using what is supposedly a “locked” ability, to make money.

well sure, the data is very precise. It's augmented with GPS.

I can also go get an inkjet printer to produce paper that has your tag number on it, slap it over my license plate and get all the ALPR systems to immediately flag my vehicle as your location.

Probably a crime, but also going to quickly poison the entire dataset

Precise but not accurate. I've gotten multiple tickets for running tolls from San Francisco that show commercial work vans or trucks (one of which didn't even have a license plate on it), despite having a compact car several states over that's never even entered that dystopian city/state.

The big databases are unlikely to retain pictures that may be used to prove innocence -- so coupled with the legal principle that computers are presumed to be operating correctly these are nothing more than automatic probable cause machines with no upside.

A LPR will tell you when a car was at a specific spot, but it won't tell you where a car is at all times. The difference may be inconsequential in dense urban areas, but it's not where I live.

Another thing that people usually forget is that a phone or a car are not a person. “Your” car being at some place doesn’t mean “you” being there. Same as a owning the murder weapon doesn’t make you directly guilty of the crime only a suspect.

With MA ez-pass, the enabling legislation specifically forbade the use of it for speed patrolling. (This may have been limited to i-90 which was the only thing that used it at the time.)

Wnen they implemented seat-belt laws, they (in at least some places) said that it would not be used as the primary reason to pull you over, it would be a secondary infraction. That changed. They can tell you whatever you need to hear to get you to vote for it, then change the law later.

Laws can change in the future, just as anything else can also change in the future. But we can't know what the future holds.

Today (the present), we do know that this particular MA law has not changed.

We cannot know that it will change.

Those aren't equivalencies. This method can be done at scale, zero cost, reliably and indiscriminately.

Tracking plates is a lot more work.

The problem with police is their power asymmetry and potential for abuse. Tools like this increase that. Additionally, they aren't just random people from the public, they're the people that desired to do policing for motivations which may or may not be healthy.

I thought in france, your entry and exit times were logged on tollways and tickets would be issued if the distance/time was too high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

Also, NY has operational speed cameras while NJ doesn't:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/speed-camer...

Location metadata can and will be used for Kafkaesque tracking of people for economic and surveillance purposes, guilt by proximity including charging people with crimes, putting people on various kinds of watchlists, and pre-crime harassment.

I remember hearing that as a kid growing up in the 90s that it purportedly existed.

IIRC the closest thing you get to that on the EZPass system is speeding through a toll plaza when they were still a thing flying through the low speed readers.

Which is a great idea btw. Makes sure that people follow the speed limit over longer stretches and not just where they expect a camera.

Norway does this a lot, the Netherlands too I think. Germany saw a significant reduction of accident rates in a trial project.

Just another data broker selling it

Literally the entire population of New Jersey would revolt. Everyone's doing a minimum of 10 over unless there's traffic.

I don't think this sort of casual lawbreaking is good for society. The law should either be changed or always enforced, rather than creating issues with (especially racially) selective enforcement and normalizing this 10-over behavior for city streets where it can easily be life-and-death for folks outside of cars.

> The law should either be changed or always enforced,

I understand

But if nobody breaks bad laws they will never change

Vice laws are a case in point

Maybe in an ideal world but in my area the city can barely keep up with things like basic infrastructure maintenance and trash. Don't think there is a lot of room for things like foresight.

Also have a little issue with things like speeding laws and the police not even following them. I was almost hit by a cop blowing a stop sign literally yesterday.

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