Technology like Onstar will locate the stolen cars. In Minneapolis the plate scanners and the retention of the information was justified mainly for investigating crimes after the fact. A crime was committed and they could go back after the fact and see who was in the area. Sounds reasonably legitimate but again the argument was on the length to retain the information. The legislature pretty much knocked it down from a year or two to 90 days. I guess I don’t mind law enforcement having the information provided it is private, secured against clerks and unauthorized use, and a very limited retention schedule. The weak links have always been the rogue officer or $12 clerk with an ax to grind or bills to be paid.
Why can’t a plate scanner simply carry a list of stolen car plates (possibly updated to the minute),
then check the scanned plates against the list without storing the scanned info afterward.
The scanner doesn’t have to retain anything. It could communicate real time with a database and even notify the cop immediately when a “stolen-car match” is identified.
@Bing what you may not realize is that it’s not just law enforcement that’s using plate scanners.
Awhile back I saw this ratty old Taurus in Brooklyn Park, driven by a guy who looked like he hadn’t showered or shaved since the Nixon administration, and it had plate scanners on the roof. I happened to be in the police station on other business a few days later and I asked if they knew anything about it.
Turns out he’s from a repo company. He drives around and when the plate scanner pings on a plate, he calls in a tow truck to repossess it.
I looked further into it and it turns out that’s getting pretty common. And best of all, a lot of those repo-scanner guys store location data for every license plate they scan, whether it’s a repo car or not. They then sell their database to data mining companies who use it for various purposes, usually marketing.
So, basically in today’s world if you own a car and you drive it anywhere, the government and private industry knows when and where you go and is retaining records of it for various reasons, not all of them altruistic.
Hmmm. The thing is the license information doesn’t do you any good without the ownership information to go with it. Ownership information is private.
And the reason they store information is that they aren’t really looking for stolen cars. Stolen cars is just the excuse that allows pulling someone over.
Ownership information is private.
Depends on the state…Here in NH…I have a license plate number and 10 bucks I can get the ownership information.
Ownership information is only theoretically private. If I see a car with license plate ABC123 in your driveway 7 nights a week, and at your known place of work 5 days a week, I can safely assume it’s yours without the state ever telling me that.
That’s the trouble with metadata such as license plate movements. A lot of information can be inferred without actually having access to the information.
I know the car is yours because it’s at your house and your office all the time.
If it’s also at a house across town constantly, and I know it’s not a relative of yours or your rental property (easy to determine via public records) and I know a single female lives there, I can start to suspect you’re fooling around.
Then via the multi-source database I’m compiling I see you sending a dozen roses on valentines day to that house and my suspicion that you’re having an affair is confirmed without me ever finding that knowledge out directly.
If I’m a particularly bad actor I can then start the blackmail process and extract some money from you. Or if I’m a divorce lawyer I can pay the database owners to send my law firm’s information to victims of adultery, so now your wife is suddenly getting solicitations from divorce lawyers with “don’t let him get away with cheating” emblazoned on the front.
And the worst part is that you don’t even have to be doing anything wrong, because detection algorithms are not always accurate. My 5 year old nephew stayed the night awhile back and watched a few episodes of Thomas on Netflix. Now Netflix has decided that I’m interested in lots of children’s programming and keeps displaying it in the recommended list.
What if instead of a 5 year old nephew it was a 35 year old friend, who watched raunchy stuff, and now my SO is noticing raunchy recommendations based on my viewing habits and starts asking me questions? And that’s a relatively innocuous example of data mining gone awry.
What about banks raising car loan rates on you because you suddenly begin to park outside a bankruptcy attorney’s office on a regular basis - never mind that you’re actually going into the coffee shop next door where you pay in cash so the transaction doesn’t get attributed to you in the database.
Privacy isn’t just for people who are doing something wrong and don’t want to get caught. There are plenty of ways you can be doing nothing wrong and still get caught up in a web of BS due to mismanaged spying.
@MikeInNH writes
"Pretty sure [license plate scanners being illegal in NH is] not true....License Plate scanners are in use at all EZPass lanes to catch lane jumpers. "
Here’s a link suggesting LPS may indeed be illegal in NH.
New Hampshire is the only state to ban automatic license plate readers, for now
SB41 … banned outright the use of Automated License plate readers anywhere in the state.
http://watchdog.org/198315/new-hampshire-automatic-license-plate-readers/
As a NH resident, I thank you for the link. As apparently was Mike, I was also unaware of this, but appreciate knowing it.
What the heck is a no funds slip? Does that mean the guy gets a free ride or didn’t have any money at the time so they’ll mail him a bill? Before I got my transponder, I went through a non-manned toll booth in Chicago that didn’t take cash. What could I do? It took me about two hours to figure out which location it was, what the 50 cent fee was, and do the on-line $1.50 transaction. I wish I would have known they’d just send me a bill-that is if Minnesota would have given them my name. That’s not the smallest transaction I ever did. I bought a Nook book and had a $15 gift card. The total with tax was $15.02, so the .02 went to the credit card. I wonder what that cost them?
@MikeInNH writes …
And as of April of 2015....
hmm … interesting … well, I guess it depends on the def’n of “license plate scanner” . I think of LPS in relation to a debate about privacy as a gadget that gathers and stores the vehicle’s plate information in a database for an indeterminate amount of time, and not just cars involved in traffic violations, but from any and all cars that happens by.
But from the link Mike supplies, it appears that NH actually does take and store photos of car license plates if they think the driver has committed a violation.
The only thing those other scanners are doing is digitizing the data and storing it. But the outcome is the same…they are storing license plate information. The other system is gathering metadata…where the NH system is just gathering data to be used for traffic violation. But license plate information is still being gathered.
The information that can be collected is currently too massive to be of use, but that will change. Any purchases on debit credit cards, itolls, etc. can be tracked, monitered and able to throw up red flags, include monitering of cell phone texts and calls including the ability to scan for keywords in phone conversations is not new. Those that sacrifice liberty for safety jeopardize both!