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Comment by adaml_623 | Hacker News Reader

Lol. Take a step back and remember that some planes are privately owned.

And now imagine a website called numberplateradar24.com that aggregates the feeds from 1000s of number plates scanners around the country. Which means you can track an individuals car.... does this sound like an invasion of privacy. Where's the dividing line? I think it's totally reasonable that private planes are allowed to encrypt their identities. As long as their position is still trackable it doesn't matter if the general public don't know everything.

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If a bunch of hobbyists wanted to build a way to track cars using publicly available methods why shouldn't they have the right to do that? Could it be creepy? Yeah, but as long as they're not exposing information that's publicly available or targeting specific individuals, then it's not what I would consider to be morally wrong.*

*On the other hand, the government using public funds to do this, combining the data with private information, and trying to keep the fact that they do this secret is wrong in my book.

As an aside tracking cars is being done now for collections and repossession industry. Right now its done by scanning parking lots or places of high density and comparing to databases of records.

>> As an aside tracking cars is being done now for collections and repossession industry. Right now its done by scanning parking lots or places of high density and comparing to databases of records.

The DMV records are not supposed to be available to anyone but the police. The ability to abuse that for crime is huge.

> not supposed to be available to anyone but the police... to abuse that for crime is huge

So it sounds like an illogical configuration on its face then.

I think I misunderstood - so it's just the identity that is being blocked (and, pursuant to this discussion, may be encrypted)? Not the actual flight data?

...and no, I don't recognize a right to "privacy" that is so tentacular as to prohibit people from walking around with a camera, running some computer vision on it, and sharing the result with like-minded hobbyists doing the same thing.

> ...and no, I don't recognize a right to "privacy" that is so tentacular as to prohibit people from walking around with a camera, running some computer vision on it, and sharing the result with like-minded hobbyists doing the same thing.

Exactly. A lot of people seem to think they can have (and therefore expect) a world in which they can cover the eyes to make themselves invisible. Like little kids, they say "I have my hands on my eyes, you can't see me!". And when that fails for obvious reasons then, unlike kids, they want this magic to be enforced by law. "How dare you look at me? You're not allowed!".

It's about lowering the cost of surveillance - want to keep track of your competitors CEO or M&A team? Just set up an alert in flight radar...and it's like you have a full time team of private investigators

The hobbyists being the communication networks, tracing your phone location?

I guess this has been tried before: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention

Well, that's the very definition of stalking

Stalking requires a target and an obsession or questionable intent. If we're stretching definitions that far, then I'll say that this is just thinking - recording inputs, correlating them and possibly acting upon them. Should we ban augmentation of thinking?

No, that's not the very definition of stalking.

Somebody should build that.

Why should governments and corps have all the fun? (Insert sousveillance/transparent society/David Brin rant here).

Are there any decent open source number plate recognition libraries yet?

https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

Scale is the difference.

As long as all vehicles are visible, sure. Why should the government be trusted to monitor what needs monitoring and not abuse the information?

Why should random people on the internet be trusted not to abuse the information?

They can't be trusted. They're just not able to abuse it as much as a government. And the worst abuses would already be against laws against, for example, crimes of violence.

Position is nice, but you do want to know if that plane a couple of miles out heading in your direction is a Piper Cub doing 80mph or a 737 doing 400mph.

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