<story><title>Repo companies have passively scanned &amp; uploaded locations of 9B license plates</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>The fundamental problem is that technology has made collecting this information too cheap. Instead of manual entry and uploads, it&amp;#x27;s automated with essentially zero marginal cost over and above putting the cameras on cars or buildings.&lt;p&gt;The solution is to make license plate collection expensive again - allow people to install license plate covers that people can manually lift to read the plate and automatically retract when the car is started.</text></item><item><author>tomatotomato37</author><text>I think the scariest part of is in the first part of this; the collection of data was &lt;i&gt;voluntarily&lt;/i&gt; crowdsourced by repo men all acting as independent actors. While right now there is still a centralized corporation that can be targeted to stop the practice, I can see a future where this stuff becomes decentralized in the same lieu as software piracy sites and their infrastructure is done today, maintained by &amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot; repomen&amp;#x2F;investigators that each have a pervasive interest in maintaining such a resource.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rlucas</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a huge proponent of this core idea -- that networked technologies have changed the cost structure that underpins our 20th century implicit understandings about privacy, and that one stopgap approach is to rework the economics of surveillance in a way that re-approximates the cost structure under which our legal and moral consensus was developed.&lt;p&gt;For example, it was never possible to read, secretly and automatically, in bulk, everyone&amp;#x27;s correspondence in the 20th century.  With email, it&amp;#x27;s a commonplace that governments do it routinely.  Encryption doesn&amp;#x27;t make it impossible to figure out what someone&amp;#x27;s corresponding about, it just makes it more expensive (as the investigator may need to devote resources to shoulder-surfing or other means instead of auto-collection).  It used to be fairly expensive to have to go to the post office and steam open an envelope, copy it, and seal it back up without detection.&lt;p&gt;Likewise for various other surveillance technologies, such as the ALPR&amp;#x2F;ANPRs.  The people who (still) write our laws were raised watching TV cops listen for a radio APB on a license plate.  For their intuitions about this matter to be valid, it should be roughly as costly in manpower, time, and attention to do a &amp;quot;live alert&amp;quot; on a license plate today as it was for those TV cops.&lt;p&gt;A pen register used to be an actual box you put at the central office on a specific bad guy of interest, not an excuse to sweep up and cross-correlate every dialed number ever.  Again, several orders of magnitude cost difference here, in a way where the difference of degree (cost) becomes a difference of kind.&lt;p&gt;The big danger IMO is when you have well-meaning legislators and jurists opining about network-enabled privacy intrusions using intuitions and examples formed with 20th century cost expectations.&lt;p&gt;Eventually those expectations will need to reflect current technology, but in the meantime, anything that can be done to raise the cost of pervasive surveillance is IMO a good thing as it buys time for legal and moral intuitions (much slower rate of change) to adapt.</text></comment>
<story><title>Repo companies have passively scanned &amp; uploaded locations of 9B license plates</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>The fundamental problem is that technology has made collecting this information too cheap. Instead of manual entry and uploads, it&amp;#x27;s automated with essentially zero marginal cost over and above putting the cameras on cars or buildings.&lt;p&gt;The solution is to make license plate collection expensive again - allow people to install license plate covers that people can manually lift to read the plate and automatically retract when the car is started.</text></item><item><author>tomatotomato37</author><text>I think the scariest part of is in the first part of this; the collection of data was &lt;i&gt;voluntarily&lt;/i&gt; crowdsourced by repo men all acting as independent actors. While right now there is still a centralized corporation that can be targeted to stop the practice, I can see a future where this stuff becomes decentralized in the same lieu as software piracy sites and their infrastructure is done today, maintained by &amp;quot;helpful&amp;quot; repomen&amp;#x2F;investigators that each have a pervasive interest in maintaining such a resource.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dole</author><text>Already beat you: local laws that require a &lt;i&gt;valid&lt;/i&gt; plate to be visible at all times when parked on public streets. (Private drives&amp;#x2F;businesses subject to jurisdiction.)&lt;p&gt;There aren&amp;#x27;t just repo men scanning in my local area; police cruisers are equipped with automatic scanners, there&amp;#x27;s numerous scanners posted on traffic poles (with silly blue and red flashing lights as a CYA) throughout the metro area, etc.</text></comment>