[throwaway31338]

Since the genie is out of the bottle, when it comes to ALPRs in the United States, I'd rather just have all the data publicly available. If the cops, data brokers, and insurance companies can see it I should be able to as well.

I should be able to see the comings and goings of law enforcement, elected officials, etc, if they can see mine.

Alternatively, lock it away behind judicial oversight. Make the cops get a warrant. Criminalize companies collecting the data from offering it in any manner other than by the order of a judge.

I feel the same way about tracking cell phones, publicly-owned surveillance cameras, privately-owned surveillance cameras that are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement, and, in general, any dragnet surveillance available to law enforcement. If it's available to law enforcement and not being conducted on an individual basis under a judicial order (or, heck, even just probable cause) I think it should be available to the public, too.

"But stalkers!"

Tough. That's the price we have to pay for keeping law enforcement in check. Either adapt or take this power away from law enforcement.

[alwa]

For that matter, it’s not unheard of for members of the US’ 18,000 law enforcement organizations [0] to engage in stalking behaviors themselves. Especially when there’s no oversight for a specific surveillance technology…

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_Unite...

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Since the genie is out of the bottle, when it comes to ALPRs in the United States, I'd rather just have all the data publicly available. If the cops, data brokers, and insurance companies can see it I should be able to as well.

I try to help folks understand that locking up public data up with a privacy law only blocks them from seeing it.

It is still trivially available to those who use personal data to negatively impact others.

ref: https://datarade.ai/data-categories/b2b-contact-data/provide...

[m463]

  > "But stalkers!"
  > 
  > Tough. That's the price we have to pay

I wonder if that won't really work well in real life.

I remember reading the difference between a citizen and a police officer is that a police officer can arrest people for misdemeanors (while a citizen can do a citizen's arrest for felonies I believe).

There's probably a good reason citizens shouldn't easily be able to prey or stir up trouble with no friction.

that said, surveillance by private companies should be regulated, and people should have access to data collected about themselves.

[quitit]

>"But stalkers!"

The stalkers are already in the house, this list isn't exhaustive by any means:

USA:

N.J. cop used police databases to stalk ex-girlfriend, investigators say https://www.nj.com/monmouth/2023/01/nj-cop-used-police-datab...

Officer Fired for Allegedly Using Police Database to Stalk, Harass Women https://www.newsweek.com/officer-fired-allegedly-using-polic...

Australia:

Former policeman accused of using force database to stalk ex-wife and girlfriend https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/former-policeman...

Former federal police officer faces new charges over stalking of ex-girlfriend https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6138318/former-federa...

(Note the two above articles are not the same person)

UK: Met police officer 'used CCTV cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend after telling her to take up sex work to pay her bills' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11868575/Met-police...

Creepy cop saw attractive woman on the road and 'looked up her license plate number so he could stalk her on Facebook' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178556/Officer-Jef...

Large miss-use in just California:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/california-police-misu...

[clippyplz]

I agree with what you're saying, but don't understand the point - if police officers in the US (about a million adult professionals) are abusing this data, wouldn't opening it up to ~300 million random people result in far more abuse than we're already seeing?

[quitit]

There’s three main points here:

1. Don’t build systems that can be abused to start with, because they will be abused, but if we must build one then see point 2:

2. Put access to this sensitive information behind a judge’s signature. Because see point 3:

3. When it comes to this kind of data: There are no “good guys” and “bad guys” - we should assume that everyone is a potential bad guy.

Whenever you hear the “good guys” justification, immediately remind yourself of the ways the “good guys” have been found to be “bad guys” in sheep’s clothing.

Whenever you hear someone use the “nothing to hide” argument, remind yourself that none of the victims in these stories had anything to hide, nor had they done anything wrong. (Much like the thousands of women who die from partner abuse every year.)

[neumann]

> Tough. That's the price we have to pay for keeping law enforcement in check. Either adapt or take this power away from law enforcement.

This position sounds fair, until you think of the skewed demographic that is paying that price.

[bryan0]

> "But stalkers!"

I think attributing the problem to “stalkers” minimizes the issues this arrangement of publicly searchable surveillance data creates. Imagine a website where you can type in anyone’s name and it shows you their last known location and their location history. You would have a system which supports universal spying for mundane and nefarious reasons alike. Not just criminal “stalkers” will take advantage of it.

Potentially this sort of arrangement would work if there are limits on the granularity, frequency, and history of the tracking data.

[authorfly]

> privately-owned surveillance cameras that are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement

You may find interesting to know that in the case of crimes being committed near or next to a business, especially independent businesses, their priority is often to minimalize risk to them and their business, and so they do not provide any recording, or use rolling footage which wipes every x days (often just one day). That way the footage is useful to them, but they do not have any additional obligations.

[Corrado]

This tracks. My sister had her car keyed (scratching the paint) in a Honda dealer parking lot while waiting for a tire repair. The dealer has cameras but when they reviewed the footage they couldn't find any evidence of the vandalization. They wouldn't let anyone else review the footage so we're not really sure what happened. However, I do know that finding evidence of a crime that happened on their property would just cause the dealer trouble and likely force them to pay for damages.

She filed a police report but that didn't really help at all. Not that we really expected it to, but she was just trying to be complete. In the end she had to pay to fix the damage and the dealer (and the criminal) had no repercussions at all.

[mixmastamyk]

Law enforcement is working to protect itself, as it always does. Unfortunately the general public is not as organized.

https://therecord.media/new-jersey-law-enforcement-sues-data...

[sdeframond]

> "But stalkers!"

The market would adapt and provide solutions to this concern. First to the rich and the famous, then hopefully to the masses.

[stainablesteel]

yeah, "you're not spying on your spouse the way your insurance company spies on you, right?" i don't like it

[potato3732842]

>"But stalkers!"

You mean private individuals doing exactly what the government doest to anyone who interests them enough?

[araes]

Generally agree on the publicly available case. Several benefits, probably a couple downsides.

- People are more aware the data's available. Most people are probably minimally aware of how much they're actually being recorded all the time. It occurs occasionally on the news, yet most likely never really consider it much unless they're the subject of constant camera monitoring.

- Anybody can check anybody, and with extremely open data archives, then everybody also knows when other people check. "This many people clicked on your account" or something similar, just with surveillance footage. Like usual, police / FBI / spooks / ect... probably just write laws to legalize not telling you and that entitled people don't have to follow those guidelines. Theory's nice though.

- Data's already there and being used, yet, currently, only the police have the data, and you never know what it's being used for unless you ask. Even then you may get a wall of legal issues to ensure you're not allowed to find out. Or you have to lawyer up and pay expensive fees to fight the legal wall.

- Data can be used for other purposes. Anonymized statistics on usage of municipal resources, infrastructure, high traffic areas, crime area behaviors. Amazing what you can find even just cruising around on Google Street View in areas known for high crime. "Damn, just saw somebody pull a gun on the street car. Duck Google driver!"

- Adds to other sources like people's webcams, government satellites, sensor stations for things like weather updates and verification of events / conditions in other areas. Amazing how difficult it's become in the era of fake images to tell whether anything is "actually" happening in some distant location.

- Partially deals with the "Who watches the Watchmen issue." The other Watchmen. Crowd sourced observation and journalism has already shown on numerous occasions that it's often more responsive, and frequently fair, than a lot of the paid corporate journalism. Ukraine was a case where the crowd source journalism and data analysis was so much better than anything the news was showing, it was like every Wiki editor was down on the ground following troop movements. Barely get the mainline news to show anything other than stock footage.

Downsides:

- Obviously stalking. Although with notices about people checking your data frequently, there's at least some push back against the stalking.

- Profiling. However, this probably already gets done by the police anyways. Dark skin areas, "ethnic" areas, ect...

- Data's there, somebody will probably find an "app" that does something miserable with the data. Too little faith in humanity to believe they'll do almost anything else after LLMs and image gen.

[phrotoma]

I anticipate some kind of open source / crowd sourced ALPR app will become the public's answer to these private data collection systems. Everyone has a dash cam and a cell phone in their car. It wouldn't take much to run local video analysis onboard, capture all the cars around you on the road, compute make, model, distance, velocity, heading, and archive it in a local DB. Then have a "that guy cut me off" button that pushes the record to a collaborative open data set like open street maps.

I hate this idea. It's a shit idea. I expect it's coming anyway.