[OceanKing]

This article takes a distinctly negative tone towards this practice. What’s the problem here? License plate data is public information, it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else. There should not be any expectation of privacy in regard to one’s license plate or the location of its sighting.

[JumpCrisscross]

> There should not be any expectation of privacy in regard to one’s license plate or the location of its sighting

The Supreme Court has continuously recognized the difference between manual and sustained, remote and automated tracking, even in public spaces [1]. The "seismic shifts in digital technology" we are presently undergoing require vigilance to be maintained in respect of the Bill of Rights.

[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-hol...

[jumby]

ALPR is not manual or sustained. It's a one-time photo of a vehicle at a specific location & time.

The DPPA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...] already restricts who has the ability to convert from plate to actual personal information.

[jstarfish]

ALPR vans endlessly trawl public and private parking lots and streets, recording your presence and movements and just waiting for you to show up in their database with an unpaid parking ticket so they can boot or tow your car.

Some of the higher-tier services use ALPR cameras that map plates to GPS coordinates. Property ownership is public information so you can narrow down the owner of a vehicle's plate based on where they're parked overnight. You can deduce where the owner works by tracking where it's parked between 9 and 6. You can deduce who the owner's associates are by tracking who he tends to park near when not at home or work.

The beauty of it is how well it scales. One van can patrol your neighborhood. Another can patrol the mall. Another can drive around and through your office park. Another might catch you simply driving down the road. It's like having spies everywhere, and they're all feeding their observations back to a central database to build a broader profile...which they later sell to law enforcement upon request.

(Or you can make like Vincent Asaro and just give a cop buddy the plate number of the car that cut you off and have your post-roadrage firebomb run expedited. DPPA sure helped that guy!)

If that's not sustained surveillance then please explain your understanding of the concept.

[kevin_thibedeau]

DPPA is toothless. NY residents get billed for toll violations on privately owned Ontario highways. That doesn't happen without the state handing over personal info on US citizens to a foreign company.

[mark212]

The US Supreme Court just made the distinction, when ruling that access to a cellular telephone carrier's location data for a particular subscriber required a warrant (and hence a showing of probable cause):

   The Government’s position fails to contend
   with the seismic shifts in digital technology
   that made possible the tracking of not only
   Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s,
   not for a short period but for years and years.
   Sprint Corporation and its competitors are not
   your typical witnesses. Unlike the nosy neighbor
   who keeps an eye on comings and goings, they 
   are ever alert, and their memory is nearly
   infallible.

_Carpenter v. United States_, No. 16-402 (June 22, 2018) (Slip Op., at 15)

That's the difference, beyond simple public/private. It's not that the license plate display itself is private but storing the data forever and being nearly infallible amounts to an unreasonable intrusion on privacy when handed over to the government. Notably, the USSC in a 9-0 ruling from 2012 held that attaching a GPS tracker to a car also required a warrant. _United States v. Jones, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012).

[gremlinsinc]

Too bad this didn't come up, when the supreme court was more liberal, now it'd surely be shot down. (applying the similar scenario to the license plates)

[jessaustin]

That was less than a month ago.

[HillaryBriss]

yep. one of the interesting things about Carpenter v. United States was that Chief Justice Roberts (a Bush appointee) joined the more liberal members of the court to form a 5-4 majority.

perhaps even more interesting, Trump appointee Gorsuch seemed to be saying that even more general data privacy could exist under the fourth amendment: ... it seems to me entirely possible a person's cell-site data could qualify as his papers or effects under existing law.

this offers a far better explanation than i can give: http://reason.com/blog/2018/06/22/scotus-rejects-warrantless...

[jessaustin]

Yeah if one actually pays attention to what Gorsuch wrote this was more like a 6-3 decision. I almost feel like he's reaching out to Thomas with this dissent, so that next time around Thomas will feel comfortable limiting police power. I think Alito is a lost cause, and now Kennedy is gone. If Gorsuch and Thomas are both down for 4A, one could imagine Roberts joining them. At that point one could imagine a 7-2 or even 8-1 decision in favor of restoring the Fourth Amendment over all state activity. That would be great, and one could trace it back to this "concurring" dissent...

[jrs95]

It's a bit naive to assume that privacy is a binary "conservative" vs "liberal" issue. Specifically applied to ICE I'm sure a "liberal" court would have been opposed to it, but both parties are very anti-privacy and the courts are so politicized now we may as well start putting Ds and Rs next to judge's names.

[ska]

   it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else. 

It really isn't though, is it? There is a bunch of policy and law here that remains to be worked out, but large scale ubiquitous surveillance and storage of your public "footprint" is really not the same thing as a person having been able in the past to follow you around and take notes.

This is one of the areas where scaling really matters, and you can do many things with these sort of databases that were simply intractable before. So I find the conceit that it is "just the same" to be inept.

I don't know where the courts and legislators are eventually going to arrive at on this, but if it is as cut and dried as you suggest then you can look forward to a near future where anyone who cares to can buy a detailed dossier on all of your movements for the last decade, say, with known and inferred contacts, assets, etc. It probably won't be very expensive.

[zkms]

> What’s the problem here? License plate data is public information, it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else.

Cool, so you won't mind if i install a GPS tracker in your car that tells me your vehicle's location 24/7, since the exact same information can be gleaned from "a person on the street seeing your plate"?

The problem with ALPR is that it allows a few, otherwise occupied people -- such as parking lot attendants or repo agents or policemen -- to drive around like they normally do and automatically collect massive amounts of data on vehicles and their location without incurring any cost on their behalf (beyond "slightly decreased fuel efficiency because the ALPR equipment needs power from the alternator").

The same act of "looking at a license plate and noting down the location" becomes an entirely different thing when conducted at massive scale and at negligible cost.

[gramstrong]

It's government surveillance. The mall can collect and record whatever data they want on their property, who cares. We can compel our government to not accept and blindly process this data en masse. It's the same as taking bulk data from Facebook, or Google, and looking for the .0001% that points to a criminal. Many, myself included, believe that this is wrong.

[InclinedPlane]

Do you consider your location data to be private? If you are out in public all day then all it takes is every business everywhere using facial recognition and conglomerating their results together to monitor your position throughout the entire day. Are you comfortable with that?

There are boundaries between reasonable use of nominally public information and the normal expectation of some degree of privacy outside the home.

[mikeash]

Let’s say we’re neighbors. I keep a close watch on your house, and every time you come and go I phone the local police and tell them, “OceanKing just got home” or whatever. Would you be ok with that?

[maxerickson]

I want legal reforms that enhance privacy, but your scenario happens all the time, private surveillance is willingly handed over to police after some incident.

It doesn't have the goofball repeatedly calling the police aspect, but that's the less interesting part to me.

[mikeash]

I agree, it does happen all the time.

My question remains: if it were happening to you, would you be ok with it?

[oh_sigh]

Yes

[ryanmercer]

Malls are privately owned property, if you don't like it don't go to them.

[mikeash]

That doesn’t answer my question.

[s73v3r_]

Just because there shouldn't be an expectation of privacy doesn't mean we have to be happy when it's revealed that a private company is tracking this stuff en masse.

[matte_black]

The trigger here is ICE. For many people in this country, anything ICE does is bad now.

[mikeash]

The trigger is private companies handing over people’s info to law enforcement en masse without a warrant. s/ICE/FBI/ and people would still be upset. Maybe a bit less just because the FBI occasionally goes after actually dangerous people.

[User23]

It’s public information. You don’t have an expectation of privacy about your license plate. The exact opposite is true: you’re legally required to display it prominently whenever your vehicle is on the public highway.

ICE goes after human traffickers too.

[mikeash]

What’s your point? All sorts of public information is not shared en masse with law enforcement. I’m not trying to argue that this is somehow illegal. This company isn’t committing a crime, they’re just assholes.

[User23]

I don’t think reporting criminals to the police makes one an asshole.

If you want open borders that’s fine. We have a congress and they can legally pass that policy. Write your representative and senators or something.

[mikeash]

They’re not reporting criminals, they’re reporting everyone.

This has nothing to do with open borders. Why would you even bring that up?

[pluto9]

Opposing datapoint here: I approve of ICE's mission, but think large-scale surveillance is an unethical implementation of it.

Modern criminal law in the West is built on the presumption of innocence. Invading the privacy of many people who are practically guaranteed to be innocent for the sake of finding one criminal that may be hiding among them is directly contrary to that.

It is not wrong for the NSA to try to find terrorists, but it is wrong for them to sift through my text messages "just in case" when they have no reason to believe I'm involved in terrorism. It is not wrong for police to enforce laws, but it is wrong for them to stop you and search your car without any reason to believe you've committed a crime. It is not wrong for ICE to secure our borders, but it is wrong for them to track the movements of millions of everyday people lest they find that one has a pattern of movement that may suggest people smuggling.

[s73v3r_]

Well, when you rip kids from parents seeking asylum, and then can't even get them back to their parents in a timely manner, yeah, people get upset.