The Alexandria Police Department is taking pictures of everyone’s cars
capitolcityproject.com
capitolcityproject.com
My belief is - if one wants privacy - they should park in the backyard (i.e. area restricted to general public), shield the license plates (if that's illegal while the vehicle's parked at appropriate place - it's another issue) from observers or do whatever seems reasonable to not emit information. If you don't emit anything, there's nothing to receive thus nothing to store - privacy problem ultimately solved. Otherwise, there's a tricky issue to recognize where lies the barrier between "that's okay" (say, neighbors notice a car and unconsciously recognize the pattern - one really can't complain about that) and "that's violation of my privacy."
Oh, and I presumed he parked in a publicly observable place, like a public parking lot or on a driveway just in front of the house or something like that. If PD'd would've used special hardware to peek into private areas that are inaccessible to a "naked eye" - that would be another (tricky) issue.
State keeping track of their citizens from their funding (taxes) is another issue, but it's not about privacy anymore.
Old Town Alexandria (http://www.visitalexandriava.com/about-alexandria/old-town-a...) is a very dense, built-up historic district. Because space is at such a premium there, lots of residences there are not going to have backyard or garage parking available; it's on-street parking or nothing.
(Source: I live in Alexandria, though not in Old Town -- that neighborhood is crazy expensive. Like, SF expensive.)
> If you don't emit anything, there's nothing to receive thus nothing to store - privacy problem ultimately solved
We've assigned Officer Smith here to follow you around and make notes about what buildings you enter and exit, and when. He won't follow you into the buildings, of course -- we respect your privacy! He'll just be waiting there for you outside whenever you step out a door.
If this makes you uncomfortable, you are free to cover yourself in a tarp or plastic garbage bag whenever you go outside. Problem solved.
Right?
Not sure, but I guess, the distinction here is active vs passive surveillance. If there's an attack on my privacy (i.e. a stalker or a bunch of ones targeting me) - that would be problematic, because I'm quite limited on (legal) options to stop that behavior.
If someone walks around the city and records everything they see, systematizing the collected data - well, we all do this. Our brains do this, our smartphones do this, some of the cars do this, and as tech progresses a number of examples would only rise. Technology just enhances our vision and memories, and I think it would be very bad idea to limit that.
Yet, I don't know the solution. I just say, that I believe "make it illegal to record things" is a bad option too - maybe not as bad as "make everyone wear garbage bags", but certainly not a good solution.
Added: I say that because I have somehow bad memory (medium-term one, like remembering dialogs after half an hour or faces of the people I met yesterday) and really happy that modern tech helps me to mitigate this issue. Obviously, I'm not thinking of spying on anyone, but I think having an ability to remember anything that happened around has a value.
I fully agree with the rest of your comment, but this part is a distinction without a difference, ultimately. With more and more complete passive surveillance, active surveillance will be less and less necessary. I think the best way forward is Brin's sousveillance idea: if there are no legal restrictions on recording anywhere, this at once evens the social/legal playing field, and prevents wasting increasing resources on stopping something which is increasingly difficult to stop.
Phrased that broadly, it would be terribly abusive and detrimental to free speech. But imagine a much more narrow rule, concerning only the mass recording and retention of geotagged, timestamped license plate photos. It may be only a quantitative difference and not a qualitative one. But public policy often hinges on distinctions of that sort, as we try to balance competing societal interests.
Why?
We limit and regulate how much technology enhances our abilities in all sorts of ways when there's a consensus that the enhancement harms society at large. Cars enhance our ability to travel, for instance, but we require their operators to be licensed and to maintain them properly to reduce the amount of accidents and environmental damage they cause. My cellphone can take pictures and record video, but there are places where I'm legally restricted from using it to do so, like courthouses and locker rooms. And so forth.
Any technology that empowers people is going to empower some of them to do icky things to the rest of us. So we have to draw boundaries to delineate where appropriate use of those technologies becomes inappropriate use. Police departments have benefited from ALPRs being so new that these lines don't exist yet for them, but the more stories like this that emerge, the greater will become the pressure on communities to start drawing them.
In this case, instead of humans everywhere remember things (imperfectly) you have computers everywhere remembering things exactly.
Or maybe I didn't communicate clearly. :)
Would it be any better if, rather than one person following you, it was one guy on every street corner, who collaborated to reconstruct the paths you walked, and kept a record?
For me, that would be just as offensive. Now consider that by collecting data points from every car, anywhere, the police can do this kind of tracking to everybody. I don't find that any better than hiring one stalker per citizen.
You remembering that you met me in a coffee shop wouldn't bother me. You following me everywhere certainly would.
The second one would be much less bothersome but I would still feel a little uncomfortable about it. Being singled out would be curious. And while it would not be the same person the whole time, we still have the physical presence and close proximity focused solely on me that would make nervous about physical harm.
So a third scenario: rather than one person following you, it was one guy on every street corner, who collaborated to reconstruct the paths everyone walked, and kept a record. This scenario is much more akin to that of the article.
I would hardly care. Sure there is still the physical presence but it is not focused solely on me. I would be much more at ease knowing that each person standing there, noting the paths of everyone that walks by, doesn't actually care about me individually. If they are not concerned about me then they are far less likely to cause me harm.
Parking enforcement has used License Plate Recognition tech for quite a while. They drive around and it records plate, location, time, etc. If your vehicle is in violation of the local parking limits, it sounds an alarm and they stop and issue you a ticket. They can also detect if your vehicle is in need of a boot/tow due to excessive tickets, etc. Just because they have records of where and when you parked, doesn't mean they are "tracking" you.
What you see with these types of sensors are easily deployable, fairly cheap, useful sensors that are doing what cops already do (license plate searches) only more quickly with the addition of geo-tagging.
But I feel that's only tangentially about the privacy - it's all about state-to-citizen relationships.
The state is not people. The state is a fiction that we use to do things in the way that we've collectively decided is appropriate. We order it to forget things all the time e.g. illegally discovered evidence, juvenile criminal histories, things ordered struck from the record in court, etc.
Anthropomorphizing the state is dangerous.
One of the reasons for this is that most of those entities are not able to be reasoned with or to show empathy in any meaningful capacity--they'll bear stances which appear to be petty grudges for years, sometimes decades, because that's the sort of timescale they can operate on.
Intuitions for individuals do not and can not apply to organizations.
By the way, knowing what is normal for a neighborhood is very much in the definition of "good old fashioned police work" that I've seen trotted out around here before.
This is the process, yes. They don't gain these abilities as some sort of natural right.
Neither of these are a dragnet over the general populace, or the creation of a record of every observation during that dragnet for computer-aided analysis, so they should expect to be in court for this too. The current court would probably be very friendly to their arguments, no matter what they are.
It is the intent and reasoning behind the collection of this information that is usually found to be objectionable, not the actual process of perceiving and remembering it. And the opposite applies here - just as a certain amount of information must be leaked in order to get things done, a certain amount of information must be spied upon in order to regulate things. It's all about balance.
There's a huge difference between a human, who can typically only remember a fairly limited amount of information, and a machine that is only limited by its hard drive capacity.
You should read Kozinski's dissent in United States v. Pineda-Moreno: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08...
Kozinski makes a compelling argument that allowing police and federal agents to apply surveillance in publicly visible areas even though they're part of someone's curtilage disproportionately favors the rich.
Should we really grant privacy only to those who can afford gated communities, garages, or other barricades against the same state employees that are supposedly serving them?
I can complain about such law, but can't really complain about others remembering my face - that would be unfair to others.
As to my original question, I'm still curious how you'd feel. What if it were facial recognition on public sidewalks and parks, and not license plates? Would you feel differently?
As for how I'd feel - I guess while I don't like the fact I'm being observed, there's nothing I could do about that. Somehow similar to feelings when others say things I disagree with - I'm not comfortable with that, but there's free speech rights.
Although, if that'd be within my powers to contribute to improving such laws (say, allowing to replace identification plates with something more privacy-respecting), I'd probably consider this option.
Your argument of avoiding a barrier between what's okay and what isn't is good, but I argue the opposite of your first point. It's not that I'm emitting the information for you to take at your will, public or not. It's impossible to do anything at all without interacting with the public.
It's that you can now easily store, retrieve and correlate my information in an unprecedented way. That's bad. So very bad.
(Summary: the job of a police officer is not to 'solve crime' -- it is to apprehend suspects and assist district attorneys in obtaining convictions; hence, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the more information they have about you, the greater the danger to your freedom & safety).
As this community knows well, you can't solve problems without data and data collection for policing historically was anecdotal and varied wildly by jurisdiction. beat cops would walk around and use their own internal sensors to take data and make correlations. This of course is subject to all the common human failings and would more often than not fail the community more than it helped - but it was rarely considered invasive.
So we have two options: Build and apply to our civic lives effective tools for persistent collection/analysis of public data and take the chance that oversight is improper or that the data will be misused. Or do we accept fewer resolved cases of homicide/speeding/kidnapping/parole etc... and have a higher probability that our PII is only kept within private companies?
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK
Combine that with the fact that you're driving around on publicly funded roads, and you find yourself without any right to privacy whatsoever. You're in public, the very definition of "not private".
Where your car goes on public roads isn't private, even if you want it to be. It never has been.
That being said, just because your car is somewhere doesn't mean you are. Any competent defense lawyer in a criminal case would point that out. In some states, traffic cameras can't be used to issue tickets unless the camera has a clear picture of the driver.
What matters is who controls the data. That person is the one effectively performing the surveillance. If you eliminate the force multiplier as a separate entity, what you see is that one or more Alexandria cops are ruthlessly hounding everyone that enters their city.
I presume that the collected data are not being published freely, probably using "ongoing investigation" and "officer safety" as a cover. I further presume that the data are being correlated and mined for the purpose of identifying criminals and assembling evidence against them, and the algorithms in use do not likewise search the records for exculpatory evidence for those who already stand accused.
The failing is not that cops are using powerful technologies to aid their work. The failing is that the police departments themselves have no technology remedy for their long-standing human failings. Rather than tracing a verifiable harm from victim to perpetrator, focusing on the facts of the case, and leaving matters of justice to the mechanisms of the courts, cops are increasingly filling quotas for their citations and encounters, punishing people on their own prerogative, and enjoying an asymmetric relationship with the public.
You want to watch us? We must ask qui custodiet custodes? Before training your cameras on the public, first point them at yourselves, and show us that you are trustworthy. Are cops prepared to confront the video evidence that they engaged a prostitute while on duty and then took a nap in their patrol car? Stop pretending that a smartphone camera is in any way equivalent to a gun. Before I am willing to tolerate in any way the trappings of the panopticon, every last cop out there, from bicycle patrol rookie to the city commander, should be willing to have a camera on his badge and uniform from the moment it is donned to the instant it is doffed, with an uncut record freely available at some point to the public.
Now, I wouldn't like having someone hanging over my shoulder all the time making sure I'm not reading HN at work, either. But sometimes you have to experience it personally before you can empathize with the person you intend to inflict that upon.
[1] http://dmv.dc.gov/service/registration-out-state-automobiles...
It's like someone (Homeland Security grants I assume) figured, we have all these mounting points already wired (traffic signals) might as well add a camera.
I figure the camera will just be built into the traffic signal in the future, and the whole unit will be IP addressable. Saves on having two different things to mount, and the light's probably already at the right orientation.
Just imagine a similar system using facial recognition and Google glass/FB/G+/Instagram/etc.