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Comment by hamdingers | Hacker News Reader

Remember that you are not being tracked, the vehicle is, because the vehicle is the dangerous thing.

The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?

I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.

Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.

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That's a whole lotta words for "it's ok because it's happening to people who do a thing I don't like"

And then you justify it by lying to us?

> This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?

Taxes was priority #1. This is a matter of public record. Being able to ascribe ownership as needed in edge case circumstances as a second order goal. Tracking was never really a priority because it was never really possible to do at scale before.

>Walk, bike, transit.

Ah, yes, the bus and subway with their always on 4k cameras that are being fed into god knows what software and algorithms which are then populating god knows what databases.

> We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?

We have been putting license plates on vehicles for decades with the intent of tracking their individual movements down to the minute? And here I thought it was for identifying their owners.

It's not just license plates.

> Turn Partial Details Into Leads Start with a vague description and surface real evidence from LPR and video.

> Search With Natural Language Just type what you’re looking for, like “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat,” and get visual matches instantly.

http://flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform

While I sort of agree with the premise, Flock is a camera system - I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera. By walking, I'm only opting out of being easily catalogued by default. It's not a reach for Flock to add a "men with black hoodies" mechanism alongside the existing "BMW with plate ABC-1234" mechanism.

> I can't opt out of being recorded by the camera.

That's the nature of the universe, though. Photons are emitted (including by you), captured, and the impressions they make are recorded and recalled (by biological brains and now electronic ones).

It's the police that we need to abolish, not the cameras that they (and every other organism) uses.

It's the scale - 20 years ago, somebody could stall a VHS camera and record me, but that video didn't get fed into massive databases that linked back to my purchases that day, job history, medical history, etc. Yeah, drawing a line on what's close enough to the past vs what's unpalatable is tricky - does't mean massive surveillance and data processing is a good thing.

Scale is real, but I want to suggest that we can be more optimistic than to regard it as dispositive on this matter.

As a thought experiment: imagine that in the next 20 years, a device or procedure is developed which allows a human to copy, from their visual memory, anything that they've seen (or at least seen recently) onto a digital medium, which some sort of verifiability of its veracity. This obviously presents the same scale challenges to which you're pointing - it will be impossible to walk around in public without being seen and identified in a way that's digitally verifiable.

But does it make police states and surveillance more likely, in the same way that Flock does? I think we can probably all agree that it does not.

And that tells us that it's not the vision or the memory of the vision that is the threat.

When the entirety of the commons is recorded, and the recordings made available for analysis by all, it's perfectly possible (and I think, inevitable) that police brutality (and even police legitimacy) will decrease.

We need to develop the bravery to say out loud that, as vision (meaning, better and smaller cameras, cheaper storage, etc) continues to improve, our need for police (and perhaps for states) decreases.

In this way, the problem of scale to which you correctly point is naturally counterbalanced.

Megacorps hoarding your data and oppressive governments are part of the nature of the universe‽

I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.

> Megacorps hoarding your data and oppressive governments are part of the nature of the universe‽

No, I _certainly_ didn't intend to suggest that. In fact, I think that the proliferation of vision is likely to bring about an end to those institutions.

> I agree that the camera is not the problem per se, but your framing is a bit strange. There's more to a camera than passively receiving photons.

Of course, but those properties (namely, storage) are shared widely. At some very low-but-experimentally-verifiable-level, photons are force carriers for many of the most easily observed phenomena in our reality.

From that, I think it's probably the peaceful and radical way to derive that, as time moves forward, the universe (and the human condition in particular) is likely to gain vision and not lose it.

Cameras will get better and smaller. Storage will get faster and cheaper and more distributed. The photons in the public sphere will be captured with ever-increasing fidelity.

When all the public sphere is recorded, and all the recordings are available to everyone's analysis, can we overcome despotic tendencies, corruption, and police brutality, and eventually statism itself?

I think that the answer is 'yes'. So I am very cautious about shifting the blame onto the (inevitably widening) vision instead of the institution. As vision grows, the need for police is decreased (and thus, the need for an abolitionist movement is increased). That's the prize on which I hope we keep our... eye.

> When all the public sphere is recorded, and all the recordings are available to everyone's analysis, can we overcome despotic tendencies, corruption, and police brutality, and eventually statism itself?

No because not everyone can afford to do all of that.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting here; I don't think I made that a prerequisite of any theory.

Frankly, it sounds now like _you_ are the one defending the existence of megacorps and states, on the basis that nobody else will have the capability to be a watcher of public spaces.

I dont't recall this being anywhere in the documentation or terms of the licensing of a vehicle. Did I miss that part?

You don't own your license plate. It is government property, as is a driver's license.

Yes, but there is nothing that says that I have to consent to a random 3rd party monitoring where I go for either of those licenses.

You mean transit, where they increasingly use facial recognition?

You mean cycling, which many walkers consider to be dangerously fast? You think they wouldn't start mandating registration tags if it became too popular?

You sound like a "if you have nothing to hide" kind of person

This is completely missing the point.

Until there's a substantial number of driverless cars on the roads, LPR systems will always equate to tracking people. You might as well argue that exposing geospatial data about cell phone movements is fine because cell phones aren't people.

These systems, when abused, amount to warrantless monitoring of civilians over long periods of time. A judge can not and will not order someone's movements to be tracked over the last six months. They can facilitate someone's movements going forward to be monitored for a specific period of time.

...and these systems are always abused. To the degree that if you've put an RFP out there for a LPR system that disposes of the scan data after 30 days, suddenly no one wants to submit a proposal.

Abuse is pretty much the default state unless there are hard guardrails against it. That knucklehead in Millersville was pretty obviously using FINCEN data to go looking up the life details of people his political party didn't like, probably because the only safeguard was that someone had to enter a relevant case number to show that the search was legal. Lo and behold a regular audit being performed by the TBI resulted in a near immediate lockout of Millersville from their system and a warranted search of said knucklehead's residence because of "irregularities". It's not hard to figure out what was going on there.

It took months to get the LPR system in Mt. Juliet, TN to actually start disposing of the scanned data, and we've already seen reports of LPR systems being abused by ICE/CBP to search for people all over the nation. What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.

> What's currently holding up Nashville getting such a system? I'm pretty sure it's the data destruction policy, because the state-level government is being run by people who think such Orwellian surveillance is just dandy.

Nashville has tons of Flock cameras now. I was just there over the weekend and noticed at least four on the interstates.

They are tracking people. It's trivial to add a passive phone IMEI catcher at every video surveillance site and correlate them with plate numbers.

Just one more data point for any 3rd party to buy from Flock and use how ever they please. Well you know as long as the check clears.

Please don't engage in simplistic whataboutism to push your tangential hobby horse about cars. Surveillance cameras will just as easily track pedestrians, bicycles [0], and public transit use.

And if you're actually trying to champion the benefits of increased accountability by tracking where every car goes, then it is incumbent upon you to first push for real effective privacy laws that prevent the already-ongoing abuses of such systems.

[0] can also easily be mandated to have identifying number plates on public roads, especially now with this surveillance infrastructure in place

>bike

And in places where bikes need license plates? Or let's say everyone switches to a bike. Do you think Flock would say "oh well, I guess we can't track them anymore" and close up shop?

>transit

Even if they still let you pay with cash, there's cameras all over there too. Maybe not automated tracking through a third party that removes the need for warrants... yet.

So that leaves "walk", which even if feasible, is something Flock already advertises tracking of as a feature. This isn't a "car tracking" issue, it's a warrantless mass surveillance issue. You may think it's only for the drivers you despise right now, but it will come for you too.

and I think you would do well to remember this system has led to dozens of false arrests and traumatic experiences for small children in the cases of faulty OCR identifying the wrong car, and millions in taxpayer settlement money having to be spent as a result. Okay, let’s say your premise is correct, that for some reason, the size of our vehicles means they must be tracked everywhere they go (but also how exactly does this make sense? A license plate is a far cry from an ALPR, they serve very different functions) — Do you honestly think that we should as a society allow a private company to do this job?

I'm sorry but is this argument in good faith? There is a loud minority of anti-car activists on HN and Reddit that simply will advocate for any policy that harass drivers.

I support private vehicle ownership and am opposed to any kind of tracking/nuisance enforcement behavior.

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