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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight.

> her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.”

The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?

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It's covered in the article. The school district has a contract with Thompson Reuters Clear. And here's more general information on that service:

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/leveraging-license-pla...

Key bit:

"With LPR intelligence tools such as Thomson Reuters license plate recognition, corporate crime professionals have the ability to share and request the sharing of commercial LPR data with other corporations."

Eg. Flock and Vigilant Solutions.

https://losgatan.com/class-action-suit-against-flock-license...

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260227692233/en/Flo...

Shouldn't be information the school district has a right to access. It's none of their business where a person's car is parked over night. I really hope society pushes back on surveillance.

It seems like overreach, to say the least.

Chicken and egg - this is a symptom of inequality in the schooling system. The school is trying to defend a particular status quo. If your schools were funded differently (eg not from hyper-local district property taxes, maybe redistributed equally at the state level), parents would feel less pressure to compete for 'better' school positions.

This is information that SHOULDNT EXIST.

That’s fucking crazy.

The craziest part of this is that a school district thinks that the overnight location of the vehicle used to transport a student has anything to do with the location of the residence. Especially when that data is from a time period when the school isn't in session.

I can think of a half dozen valid scenarios why the vehicle used for school drop off is parked away from the student's residence at night.

e.g. Vehicle belongs to a non-custodial parent from out of district who handles drop off. Vehicle is used by a household member to do overnight shift work. Family just moved, of course their vehicle wasn't being parked in the district in July. ALPR character recognition error. Parent and student live elsewhere in the summer, and still qualify as residents within the district.

It sometimes boggles the mind the amount of inflexibility that people doing these jobs have/are willing to use, especially in something so consequential.

There are companies that scan every parked car visible in any public accessible spot.

The real question is why do they only sell information to services designed to cause harm.

Who else would buy it? What use exists for this data that isn't harmful to society?

Finding missing people? Finding criminals?

“Find me the missing person, and I’ll find the crime.”

— Lavrentiy Beria (Probably)

People not returning vehicles to the banks, or commiting fraud by taking up resources in districts they don't live in are technically criminals.

There are, in fact, many crimes

Discouraging people from using cars at all?

Catching the pedophiles. Think of the children.

As long as theyrw not in the Epstein Class.

More like catching the children. Think of the pedophiles.

Repossessing cars isn't societally harmful, quite the opposite in fact.

If it was not possible or even just much harder to repossess a car, lenders would be much less willing to grant loans to people in order to buy a car.

Private Investigators; vindictive ex-lovers; spiteful law enforcement; personal vendettae; abortion tracking...

...some combination of all of the above?!

Returning a vehicle to a bank that someone has stopped paying for isn't exactly harm. If banks were unable to get vehicles back, people with bad credit would have a much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place.

>much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place.

This is a good thing; add "houses" to the list, too. Credit is too freely issued — we live on debt (as a society/world).

I've seen people throw their $20k in negative equity into a new purchase/lease — and just been baffled.

--but I agree: lenders oughta'be able to retrieve their lien'ed properties.

Repossessing collateral on a secured loan is not a service designed to cause harm.

There are A LOT of throwaways talking about repossessing cars in this comment. that's a little weird. Guess I struck a nerve at some company.

e.g. at BigBox Mart towtrucks will traverse the parking lanes, with ALPR cameras quickly detecting repos to snatch.

My car is paid for but I just don't display a license plate period (in my US state it's only a $10 fine to not).

>My car is paid for but I just don't display a license plate period

Which of course draws a bunch attention to you regardless.

It's not about hiding — it's about sending a message.

IIRC, Steve Jobs was known to do this in his black plateless Mercedes (decades ago).

Wired even wrote this up (2010). Getting a new lease every 6 months, which apparently legally let him go plateless somehow. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/the-mystery-of-steve-jobs-plat...

I found it pretty grossly offensive a practice.

I lived nearish to him during this era, and after this article was published, it seemed like every black Mercedes in town started going tagless.

It really doesn't, there are lawful reasons to not have a plate yet.

Tennesee also doesn't require antique vehicles to display the license plate (only to have it "available upon demand"). It's only 25 years old to be considered "antique," but you must request this from DMV (i.e. isn't automatic).

There's an XKCD on licence plates (https://xkcd.com/1105/) which is probably relevant to your case, too.

I have a printout of #1105 in my glovebox, specifically because my license plate is similarly-ridiculous (and "unscannable" but a legally-issued specialty plate). On the reverse is a copy of my state's law on "proper display of registration identifier," but not to discuss with a cop (for him to find in event of being an asshole, searching my vehicle).

My vehicle blends in and is otherwise-legal — non-compliance encourages me to obey most traffic laws — but I do carry the plate in my passenger seat to display in event of pull-over (my plate is some iteration of "no plate," and I do respect individual officers' safeties [1]).

[1] They have every right to know, when performing a lawful investigation. My plan would be to hold it up while initially stopped (to show intent of identification, my plate is complicated in many ways and must be searched for in a very odd way).

I think its funny you think youve come up with some unscannable license plate.

My state does not allow certain confusing characters, but I'm part of an organization which issues plates in specific violation of aforementioned character restrictions (as an added bonus the plate/organization is emblazzened with `EMERGENCY` across the bottom). ALPR camerae mis-read the plate, having applied state interpretation rules — no human outside my organization has ever read it correctly, either [0].

But of course since you cannot even see it anymore it is definitely unscannable. I can drive by speed camera without issue (i.e. no citations received; not that I regularly do, but have tested).

[0] Only once have I been pulled over, in the past decade (back when plate displayed normally), after traveling behind a cop for miles going 100mph+ through Dade County mountains. Cop: "I have no clue what agency you're with — you're plate didn't scan — but you need to slow the fuck down. You're lucky I have somewhere else to be!"

Sounds like you and your "organization" are willfully misusing Tennessee E or amateur radio plates. But you do you.

We are nobodies, while you obviously are (good detective work there Chief).

    lawful avoidance != non-compliance

Definitely had to fight to get it approved, initially; oddly enough, this year I'm going to get the new standard-issue TennesseansforPeace™ plate (you can't visually read it from afar — the contrast is terrible! — like the old Smokies™ plate).

can you put some kind of filter the screws the cameras up?

These lens "blockers" are working less-and-less well (as tech gets better if they ever worked well at all), and seem to increase targeting from law enforcement.

In Tennessee, after the first two citations for "improper display of registration" it becomes an actual crime (an actual misdemeanor); if I ever get to this point (four months now multiple cops behind me haven't given a single F), I have an increasingly-insane series of "protests" that have semi-interesting legalities [0].

[0] e.g. transfer registration to brother ($10 gift fee every few months, which results in no tag requirement); small 3ft trailer (possibly with guillotine erected atop, blocking view), as TN does not issue license plates to trailers less than 15ft length

----

This isn't about "disappearing" (impossible in any modern civilization) — it's about sending a message and adding one small additional layer of protection from simple broad ALPR searches.

$10?? I thought it was a major crime to drive without a license plate.

Welcome to Tennessee (it shouldn't matter, but it does: clean-cut taxpaying middle-aged white guy, with former background in govt data centers [1] ). If I had any detectible minority status, I would display a plate properly.

More onlookers (from behind) snap photos of this taglessness than any other politics/offensive bumper sticker I've had [2] — my only thought is that my vehicle misleads them to think that perhaps I'm undercover I.C.E. (purposefully obscurring)..?

[1] I've woken up blackout in a comped hotel when friends in identical situation got arrested/PI; I still carry a long-expired govt work badge in my moneyclip

[2] 2nd-most popular, all-time, was "Patron Saint of Denials Luigi Mangione" image

In New Jersey your parked car could be towed for not having a plate.

In Tennessee we don't even issue front plates. Most vehicle registrations are <$30.00 (imagine!).

Twenty years ago my then-fiance and I were entering NYC via tollbooth, and the attendant harrassed us about "where is your front license plate?!"

That's odd, because Pennsylvania doesn't have front plates either, and it is pretty close to NYC.

PA's blue/yellow standard plate is soooo ugly they don't need to issue more than one.

Fun fact: Motorola Solutions sells LPRs not only to law enforcement (via Vigilant Solutions), they also sell them via the "Digital Recognition Network" arm to third party companies - tow operators, private operations, and so on.

Some of the largest customers of DRN are banks, especially sub-prime lenders :)

https://drndata.com/about/

https://drndata.com/news/motorola-solutions-acquires-vaas-in...

And all of them... feed right into the greater LEARN (Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network) system that the feds and company have access to at all times.

This isn't the Motorola that makes phones. Lenovo owns Motorola Mobility. But America kept the highly profitable business of building a surveillance state. Yay.

The scary part isn't a single camera, it's the aggregation

I've often thought to spook legislators by crowd-sourcing this and scaling it. Any member if of the public can upload dashcam footage, and can search any number plate captured by the network: including legislators, town councilors and school board members. Access is gated by uploading dashcam and having it corroborated by other footage to avoid faked footage, e.g. cross-checking license plates in the same area.

My concerns are the decision makers may rake the wrong lesson from this, my own moral injury, and/or legal exposure when this information is inevitably used to harm someone. Also, Law enforcement would happily co-opt this service. Perhaps making the searches themselves public would alleviate same of the challenges.

I've thought about doing this, but ironically you'd be sued into oblivion where I'm from. Likely prosecuted by the both the state and city attorney for violating privacy laws already on the books. Yet somehow Flock is deploying cameras everywhere.

My system would have been much more open on purpose. Like the private bittorrent tracker of security cams. You stream footage to the centralized cloud for aggregation, and get access to the full dataset in return. Perhaps with some "ratios" built in to incentivize sharing like you do for seeders vs. leechers on the BT network.

It's a fascinating technical problem - but the legal minefield is crazy even if you're doing it as a form of protest.

I also think the lessons would be lost on the general public. If anything, it would result in laws that made such things only legal for private licensed companies or some such - I'd simply be assisting in furthering regulatory capture.

> Likely prosecuted by the both the state and city attorney for violating privacy laws already on the books.

Recording in places where there is no expectations of privacy is legal, and it would be very useful to establish case law that establishes that scaling up can impugn privacy. I selfishly don't want to be a defendant since I can't afford it, but if I won the lottery jackpot, this is what I'd be working on.

more concerning than overnight, in my opinion, is monitoring it in summer months when school is presumably out and keeping a record of it for who knows how long.

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