[r0h1n]

I'm curious - how exactly would one refute the following argument put forth by data brokers and repo agents?

> But Digital Recognition and other so-called “data brokers” who collect plate scans are fighting Hecht’s bill, arguing that repo agents are not invading privacy when they scan a ­license plate, which is available for all to see. The data brokers do not disclose the owner of the plates, they point out, though customers such as banks, insurers, and private investigators have ready access to that information.

[berberous]

The scan of the license plan is not really the issue, it's the collecting of the scan, tagging it with GPS, and aggregating the scan into large, permanent databases that can be accessed by both government and private corporations.

If all you do is scan a plate and display "car payments past due", or discard the scan if the car is not wanted, it's not all that different from a human looking for a car.

But these folks are creating historical databases that capture everywhere you have ever been. These sorts of databases can be mined retroactively to discover all sorts of sensitive information, similar to what was pointed out by Justice Sotomayor in the recent GPS tracking case, U.S. v. Jones:

"GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person's public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. See, e.g., People v. Weaver, 12 N. Y. 3d 433, 441-442, 909 N. E. 2d 1195, 1199 (2009) ("Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on"). The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future."

While the government can currently look up your license plate information, or track you manually, they are limited by their resources. (From Alito's opinion in U.S. v. Jones: "But it is almost impossible to think of late- 18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case. Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach's owner?") A nationwide database of historical location information -- that may not currently require a warrant under the 4th amendment to access -- is ripe for abuse. Letting private companies access the data is also scary.

These data brokers are probably right that they don't currently violate any privacy laws, however. But that just means we need to change the laws, as I think this most definitely needs to be a violation of privacy.

[__david__]

> The scan of the license plan is not really the issue, it's the collecting of the scan, tagging it with GPS, and aggregating the scan into large, permanent databases that can be accessed by both government and private corporations.

I've had this idea in my mind to build the exact same thing, but have it be crowdsourced data and available to everyone for free. Wouldn't you like to know where police cars spend most of their time? Wouldn't you like to see where your mayor's car is at 3am? If private corporations and the government get the data, I should get the data, too.

[berberous]

An amusing story along those lines:

"In 2012, the StarTribune newspaper in Minneapolis tracked the movement of the Mayor R.T. Rybak's car 41 times at license police readers in the prior year. The newspaper put the information on a map and gathered the data through public records requests.

As a result of that report, the mayor directed the police chief to recommend a new policy on data retention, the ACLU said."

[Mindstormy]

Is it legal or even possible to prevent these scanning devices from working by having say a ring of infrared LED's shining on your license plate to prevent a camera from being able to capture it?

[Crito]

I believe that some states have laws against devices used to obscure your plate to cameras, but I am not sure about that.

If not, that trick would only work on shitty cameras for so long, before manufacturers of these scanners wizened up.

[zxexz]

I'd say just cover the end of your driveway in mud, and 'accidentally' back up as fast as you can.

[protocow]

The repo companies here are journalists. They are collecting and reporting to their customers truthful facts. This does invade privacy, but so does TMZ.

[Crito]

TMZ could not get away with doing to non-public figures what they do to celebrities.

[samstave]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/wheels/2011/10/27/how-steve-...

Fuck everything about license plate tracking, storing and mining.

Facebook is required by the city of Menlo park to install plate trackers at their new campus building that will track all cars that drive by.

[JPKab]

I'm not thrilled about this, but a license plate in public view is free for anyone to do whatever they want with.

The argument against doing this is exactly the same as the argument against people scraping public data. It's something a human could do manually, but now that its automated and much more intense in volume, suddenly its wrong.

I really, really don't like it, but that's probably why many people thought that license plates and car registrations were bad things when they were first introduced.

From a financial perspective, this technology, shitty as it is, probably saves us all money on our car payments. Tracking down pieces of shit who default on car loans? I'm all for it. (Note: If you can't afford your car payment, you are contacted and can easily make arrangements to hand the vehicle over to the bank. If you don't do this, you are a thief who is making it that much harder and more expensive for another low-income person to buy a vehicle.)

[gnerd]

I think the real interesting thing about this isn't any of these questions but really, much like with the internet, when does an IP become a person (or in this example, when does a license plate become a person)?

Is there a legal distinction? As I understood it, the reason you don't lose points on your license if you get caught by a speed camera in an automated fashion, is because technically, legally, they have to prove it was you in the car (but to charge a fine, they just have to prove it was your car and it violated a traffic law).

So if you think of it in that context, then how can I be sure it was you at all for those "sensitive" situations? If I can't be sure it was you, and the information was public (where you had no expectation of privacy in the first place), then is that information as protected as say, your medical records? (No really, I'm asking).

[Crito]

Many of the people that you could conceivably want to be protected from would not particularly care about the possibility of the car being driven by other people. Furthermore, in many situations, it is likely that the GPS-tagged data could be combined with other data, such as employment history, to greatly disambiguate the actual driver of the car at the time.

[PeterisP]

I don't see how quantity suddenly transforms a permitted thing into a forbidden one.

If I don't need your permission to look at your car's licence plate on a public street and write down when and where I saw it, or simply take a photo of said licence plate (as photos currently include timestamp+location) - then the situation doesn't change in any way and I still don't need your permission even if I did the same for a thousand cars this morning, and my buddies did the same thing for ten thousand cars more.

[deeths]

The law has thousands of examples of quantity turning permitted things into forbidden ones (or at least regulated ones, which is probably more the case here). This is in no way a unique restriction.

For example:

1) If someone glances in your window as they walk by your house, that's fine. If they stand there all day, they're probably guilty of stalking, a crime.

2) If one person is holding a protest sign in front of city hall, that's legal. If a thousand people do it, that's a protest, which in most cities is a regulated activity requiring a permit.

3) If you pour your morning orange juice out in a storm drain, that's probably legal. If you pour thousands of gallons of OJ into a storm drain, you're breaking environmental laws.

4) If someone drives by a street, that's fine. If they go back and forth down it, they're cruising, which is a crime in many cities.

5) If you give a friend $100, it's an unregulated gift. If you give them $20k, then that's regulated by tax laws.

6) If someone sells a stock and buys it back, that's fine. If they do it tens of thousands of times in a minute, they may be breaking securities laws.

7) If you bring $1000 into the country, that's an unregulated event. If you bring $100k, it becomes regulated.

8) If you access a web site with an automatic tool, that's fine. If you access it a thousand times a second, that's a DDoS attack, which is a crime.

9) If you cut a tree down on your property to sell the wood, that's fine. If you cut hundreds down, then you're running an illegal logging operation.

and on and on.

I totally don't buy the argument that it's unreasonable to forbid or regulate the case of collecting license plate numbers based on it just being a different quantity of something that's permitted. Laws use quantity as the basis for drawing the line between legal/illegal or unregulated/regulated all the time.

[PeterisP]

Okay, this is a very valid point that laws can and make a distinction based on quantity.

However, in this point no such distinction has been made, and thus they should be treated equally. There is clear law on the "low quantity" case, and no distinct law on the "high quantity" case - so the same principles should be applied even for thousandfold or millionfold increases unless/until the lawmakers (not the courts) draw a line somewhere.

[deeths]

I totally agree. I think the point most people are trying to make here is not that this _is_ illegal, but that it should be made illegal.

[me_again]

This article is specifically about a lawmaker trying to draw a line, and the lobbying around that process. At least as far as this article goes, no court case is underway, nor is there a claim that this is currently illegal.

[PeterisP]

On the other hand, I'm very very worried about the risk of making it illegal - because those justifications can be used to make the low-scale personal activities into 'victimless crimes', leaving the government with a monopoly on surveillance while criminalizing citizens who do the same thing.

I'd rather prefer if everyone was permitted to do this at all scales, rather than risk restrictions on what people can do with their minds and devices with stuff that they can plainly see - it's similar to various restrictions on recording police officers in action, so as "to protect their privacy".

The government will do their thing anyways (as Snowden showed us), so if any restrictions are implemented then they will only restrict us, but not protect us.

[barrkel]

Can you understand how individual letters may not be copyrighted, but an arrangement of them into a large text may be?

[PeterisP]

Can you understand that if you give me the individual letters or sentences, than I'm allowed to arrange them in a large text even if you don't want them to be arranged that way?

I'm aware of the copyright legislation that applies to copying of data compilations - but those restrictions don't apply here, where people are [re]creating databases from independently made real world observations.

[TeMPOraL]

No, I can't. It's actually a big philosophical/legal issue involving "illegal numbers"[0], definition of copying and colour of bits[1].

Don't make problems simple and obvious when they're not.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

[1] - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

[barrkel]

My argument was by analogy, but you've taken the analogy beyond its breaking point into another domain.

A single fact about a person at a particular place is not much more useful than knowing the placement of a single letter in a word. But if you know the placement of several letters in a word, you can guess the word - and that has a whole bunch more information [1]. Similarly, know several facts about a person's path, more information comes to light that is not evident from single facts alone, in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; place of work, school of children, likely friends, relatives, partners, potential medical issues, possible infidelity.

The issue you're getting at is a philosophical issue related to the sorites paradox on one hand, and the zero marginal cost of duplicating information on the other. The former is somewhat related to the issue at hand, but the latter definitely isn't.

[1] Semantically, not by Shannon, for the autistic nitpickers out there.

[ellyagg]

Differences in degree produce differences in kind all the time. Some places you're allowed to have small amounts of recreational drugs, but if you have large amounts you're presumed drug dealing. Over the years we've allowed tips uncovered on undercover operations to nab unrelated criminal activity; now that the government is shown to be monitoring online behavior on most of us, we recognize it as a problem. Some places you're allowed to cut down a Christmas tree but if you clear cut the forest, people would look askance. The examples of quantity mattering are endless. Often the issue has to do with power. Once the quantity and efficiency of an activity affords vast new power, that power must be scrutinized and regulated.

[mattfenwick]

> the situation doesn't change in any way and I still don't need your permission even if I did the same for a thousand cars this morning, and my buddies did the same thing for ten thousand cars more.

I hate to say it -- because it's probably irrelevant from a legal perspective at the moment -- but this sounds exactly like the fallacy of the beard to me.

(edit: not to accuse you of committing this fallacy, just felt this was important enough that it should be highlighted)

[HarryHirsch]

If you can't understand how indexing turns bulk data into information you are clearly beyond help. Hint: there is a whole industry involved in data mining, and since time immemorial what distinguished a library from a pile of books is the library index.

[PeterisP]

Yes, and if I have the right to the bulk data, then I automatically have the right to all the knowledge that I can mine or infer from that data. THAT is the point that there is no difference. I can create information from data - and saying "raw data is okay, but the information mined from it isn't okay" is ridiculous.

If I have unconditional permission to read books from library, then that allows me (I don't need any extra permission) to use what I read to create a library index - even if you explicitly don't want me to have such an index.

And the public information permissions really are unconditional - what I see in public space is public info. There's no "... unless you write it down" or "...unless you plan to keep that data forever" or "... unless you don't gather too much" or "... unless you tell it to others" or "... unless you profit from it" or "... unless you make interesting conclusions from the raw data" - it's just that, public and unrestricted.

Once I have a legally obtained fact in my mind or my computer, I'm allowed to do pretty much everything with that knowledge, barring very specific exemptions such as blackmail or insider stock trading.

[mikeash]

Saying your opponent is "beyond help" is a great way to have them dismiss your side entirely.

I'm disappointed, as I was hoping for some sort of informative argument, as someone with no strong opinion either way.

[CodeMage]

Somehow, I doubt that this would be the first time the legislation had to deal with a Sorites paradox.

[pizza234]

A very pertinent, technological example, for the unconvinced: copying one street from google maps, versus mass-scraping entire locations.

[argumentum]

This is right:

> The scan of the license plan is not really the issue

This is wrong:

> it's the collecting of the scan, tagging it with GPS, and aggregating the scan into large, permanent databases that can be accessed by both government and private corporations.

The real issue is the legal requirement that every car must have license plates and that every car must be registered to a "person" (individual or corporation).

If there were no such requirements, we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place.

[_delirium]

This issue that individual observations usually seen as benign become concerning when aggregated at computational scales is coming up in government surveillance as well. It is fairly uncontroversial that the police reading your license plate as they walk by your car isn't a 4th-amendment violation: it's not a "search" to view the exterior of a car parked on a public street. But is it still okay if the police start tracking the movements of all cars around the city using a network of license plate readers? Many people would be wary of that, but it's not clear what the difference in kind is or where a line could be drawn.

In the government case, the "mosaic theory of the 4th amendment" is an attempt to produce a new rule that certain aggregations of non-search data become searches when aggregated, so it may require a warrant to track you around the city with a network of license-plate readers, while it doesn't require a warrant to look at the exterior of your car normally. It's a bit fuzzy, though, and not clear it will survive (or be practical to administer). And it's not clear whether something analogous should or could be done for private collectors of data. And of course if it isn't, then that's an easy loophole for the government too: the government can just buy the data from the private data collectors. Under current law, at least, the government buying data lawfully collected by a private party who willingly sells it isn't considered a search, and doesn't require a warrant.

[iamsalman]

Come to think of it -- humans can't memorize all the number plates they see. Machines can. It's the "recording" of these images (though there for everyone to see) which takes us into the gray area.

[chiph]

In addition, the problem most people don't recognize with this, is the database keeps a history of where the car has been seen. This history is ripe data for divorce attorneys who can use it to show that assignations at motels took place.

Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems - I had a neighbor who split up because the Google car photographed a motorcycle in their driveway that wasn't the husbands.

[mseebach]

> Already, mapping technology can cause marital problems

No, affairs can cause marital problems. Technology just makes it easier to get caught This is not a vindication of the technology in question, but it can't be blamed for everything.

I can't help but think that cheating business travellers had it a lot easier before the advent of ubiquitous, near-free mobile long distance telephony made it easier for spouses to keep tabs on the travelling partner. That doesn't make telephony a cause of marital problems.

[TeMPOraL]

I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour.

Lying to people is a bad idea; some people mistakenly believe that they can lie freely without others knowing, and then cry foul when new technologies threaten that belief.

Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation; technology only allows us to look at this web faster and in more detail, and thus spot more inconsistencies in our model (i.e. lies). It's not the fault of technology if you lied and got caught.

[300bps]

I see this as a general trend of misattributing problems to technology that are actually caused by one's own behaviour.

I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right?

We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem.

How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-atheists-we-dis...). I guess the problem isn't their boss checking via license plate scanning whether or not they go to church every week, their behavior is the problem.

I guess we better tell political dissidents to knock it off too.

And let's not forget abuse of the data. You seem to think that this data is perfectly protected, perfectly monitored. You really can't imagine a scenario where a rogue cop pulls over a young girl, becomes obsessed with her and then begins stalking her by abusing electronic tracking systems he has access to? It's happening already - Google gave me too many examples to cite.

Everything we do, everything we say, has consequences that spread through the great web of causation

This is astoundingly pseudo-intellectual tripe. The reality is that what people do in their own private lives is none of your business, and people seeking to track people's every movements are evil.

[dntrkv]

I see. So stop doing anything controversial and you'll be just fine, right?

No. But if you are lying, you have to realize that you can be caught. The fact that some kind of technology makes it easier for you to be caught is not the technologies fault. Phones, cameras, computers, internet, all make it easier for you to be caught doing something you weren't supposed to be doing.

Should it be illegal for photographers to take pictures of people in public? What if that photographer publishes the pictures on their blog? What about people taking pictures/videos of police officers? Should they be allowed to upload these pictures/videos to the internet?

We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem.

No, the problem is people that have problems with homosexuals.

How about atheists? They're more disliked in the U.S. than just about any group out there (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-atheists-we-dis...). I guess the problem isn't their boss checking via license plate scanning whether or not they go to church every week, their behavior is the problem.

Again, the problem here is the boss checking the license plates to make sure the employee goes to church. It's not that the plates are being logged, it's that the data is being used in a malicious manner.

[TeMPOraL]

> We better tell closeted homosexuals that someone tracking their movements isn't the problem; their behavior is the problem.

No, my point is that it's the people doing the checking to then hurt others that are the problem, not the tools used to track, and not even the act of tracking.

> You really can't imagine a scenario where a rogue cop pulls over a young girl, becomes obsessed with her and then begins stalking her(...)

I can, but again, it's the cop who is the problem, not Google or Facebook or ALPRs.

> This is astoundingly pseudo-intellectual tripe.

It may sound like that for people who don't grok it, but it's actually also the base for my whole argument. If you understand this "tripe", then you can see that there are pretty much infinite ways you can use to obtain particular information; they only differ in cost. You can't ban them all. Progress of technology only reduces the cost of accessing some facts about the real world.

Let's look for ways to stop people from doing bad things instead of trying to fight the progress, with all the benefits it brings. For centuries we relied on limited access to information as a proxy for safety. We can't do that anymore.

[the_ancient]

under that logic we should all be implanted with a sensor the records audio video of everything we see, say, and hear, as well as providing real time location data.

After all you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.... right

[TeMPOraL]

No, this does not follow.

Also, "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" is only partially not true, and I think it deserves pointing out.

If you have nothing to hide, then you only have to fear evil people (who may want to harm you, and the more they know about you the easier it gets) and morons (who jump to conclusions).

[PeterisP]

the_ancient - under that logic, I should be allowed to record what I hear, and if I catch you ever lying to me or breaking your verbal promises, you won't be able to deny that.

[dntrkv]

Go for it. Nothing is stopping you from doing that. It's just people will think you're a weirdo for doing it.

[finnh]

Do you own curtains?

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, I do, but I don't find them relevant here. Suing you for breaching my privacy is completely independent from the fact that if you caught me lying to you by peeking through the curtains, I'd only have myself to blame.

[natch]

It wasn't clear that there was an affair happening.

[gnerd]

I don't know. People are unlikely to remember the license plate (unless it strikes an obvious pattern) but a person who was so inclined could write numbers down manually and store them indefinitely a bit like a CPU with no storage mechanism simply would hold the data in volatile memory... unless we plug in a hard drive.

[sudomal]

I'm imagining a future where most cameras have Street View style blurring in their hardware. Where vintage digital cameras are sought after and illicit manufacturers produce unauthorised copies with the feature disabled.

[Crito]

I have a picture of my cars license plate in my phone for convenient access. Furthermore, if I am ever in a fender bender I want to have the ability to photograph everything, with license plates unblurred.

[rmc]

Just cause something is publically visible doesn't mean it's not private. Privacy is about control of the data, not whether the data is visible in public or inside private property.

By taking, storing and cataloging the data, they, not the car owner, now have some control over what happens to the data. Hence it's an invasion of privacy of the car owner.

[bertil]

iamsalman offers a great response. Legally (and conceptually) there is the idea of a collection, a compilation being valuable in and on itself: this has been enforced to prevent people from selling phone books and TV programs without paying the original ‘compilers’, phone companies and TV stations, not as operators but original authors of an exhaustive description. Collecting changes useless information into, anecdotes, into a usable product: that’s the whole point of those companies, they (presumably by contract) guarantee a return rate that makes them economically sound; that changes the nature of ‘looking around’.

This idea is essential to all the creep factor around Google’s recurrent controversy: the problem is not taking street pictures, but guaranteeing that any house can be seen by anyone; it's not to murmur in your boss's ear ‘that’s the sub-commissioner in grey’ but potentially matching anyone’s face to their full public history. This is what made every page of a phone book precious, and every post-it with a phone number on it worthless.

[maxerickson]

U.S. law has moved away from that idea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

But it should still be straightforward to make laws saying that the tags on a vehicle are a particular type of information and then restrict the way that businesses are allowed to use it.

[bertil]

Indeed on the copyright of collection -- which as a fact was abused; but not the change of nature of the information.

I really don’t think that you can make enough information particular enough to get away with disanonymisation techniques: you standing anywhere in a city, with a block accuracy is enough to identify most people on a transport map; even whether you like a handful of movies, and in what order or when you saw them is enough to isolate individuals from a VoD database.

[maxerickson]

A company can make use of the observations without aggregating them. For instance, if they have a documented interest in a tag, I don't really have a problem with them disseminating it to their vehicles and checking it against live scans.

[bsder]

Simple, I have a database wherein I scan the license plates of all known repo men and upload their current whereabouts. That way when they enter the neighborhood, I can stop and have a chat with them.

Now see the issue?

[gregimba]

I sense a new startup to track police officers.

[lone-star]

It's not so much the scanning of plates which is invading privacy. I wouldn't mind them scanning my plate just to check when a car entered or exited a parking lot. The problem is saving and matching this data to actual people. Then selling this information to corporations and PIs.

[belorn]

Its not about invading privacy, but rather about illegal handling of private and sensitive information.

The information about who is where and when is information that should be treated in similar way as credit cards numbers, medical information, and so on. Repo agents do not actually need to store this for their businesses, so their argument is easy refuted by simply denying their ability to profit by selling sensitive information about peoples private life.

[PeterisP]

If I'm walking on a public street, then that isn't private information - unlike medical information that's entrusted to some specific people bound by restrictions, what happens on the street is public data. And I'm perfectly allowed to say "hey, you know what? Yesterday I saw Belorn walking down that street!" no matter if you want to hide that - it's not dissemination of private and sensitive information.

[belorn]

If you feel so, I hope you don't mind if someone like the police create live 24/7 tracking of your position. Any driving, any movement... always tracked.

If don't consider that a intrusion of your privacy, then that is up to you.

[graylights]

I agree public street is public info. But it sounds like they're scanning more then public street. At what point does it become private? 1. Parked on a public street in front of my home 2. Parked on private parking lot at my apartment 3. Parked in my driveway 4. Parked in my garage with door open. 5. Parked in my garage but visible through window if you angle the camera just right.

[PeterisP]

I believe that question has been asked many times in courts and is settled long ago. Your examples 1.-4. would be treated as "in plain view" (if seen from standing on that public street) and 5. wouldn't.