I cannot think of a use of license-plate reader technology which is not immoral.
With the rise of this kind of tech and its prevalence, I think the privacy-focused among us should start pushing to outlaw the use of this tech and eliminate the need for external identification on vehicles.
> I cannot think of a use of license-plate reader technology which is not immoral.
The parking garage I use every weekday reads my plate, and opens the gate as I have a subscription. Same thing happens when I want to leave. Is that immoral?
It's less about the technology about license-plate reading and more about what people do with the data afterwards.
I would restructure the argument as " I cannot think of a usage for storing the data of a license-plate reader for purpose of selling it which is not immoral." or something like that.
> It's less about the technology about license-plate reading and more about what people do with the data afterwards.
As someone who cares very much about probably I think this is a point that cannot be stressed enough. It is mostly about storage. Storing things is the major danger. Of course there are use cases too, and I would feel uncomfortable with the police tracking every car on the 5 freeway, but tracking requires storage.
Honestly I think your parking garage example is a great use. I can think of others. A notification of your friend or family member pulling into your driveway. Have your house do things like turn on the lights or give you a notification. It could be a good way to do parking meters. I'm sure people could think of more. Technology always has two sides to the coin, it's always a balance of using it only for ethical things. But that requires nuance.
Edit: a cool way to use these might be like we use passwords. Your license plate is a password (or let's say username). OCR is used to identify the plate, then it hashes it, checks the hash with that in the database and bingo, door opens. I think that's a level of privacy most of us are comfortable with. There's no retention of the license plate, no good way to identify who's it is, and if the database is hacked the attacker doesn't get your plate.
When I visited Seoul this was one of the coolest "daily life" things I noticed. All parking garages, even by the hour ones, operated this way. There was no ticket to lose, no ticket to accidentally de-magnetize, etc. You pulled in unhindered, and when you went to left the machine had your total up for display before you even stopped rolling to pay.
So you can make your own judgement about the morality of this, but here's a system that I worked on and I sleep just fine at night[1]. I'm a privacy-conscious guy, and nothing I saw working on this made me particularly uneasy.
Highway Weigh Stations are ostensibly there to ensure safe commercial vehicle operations. The system I worked on had a number of different sensors. A mile or so before the weigh station, there was a weight-in-motion (WIM) scale embedded in the highway; this part of the system measures (somewhat coarsely) the weight of the vehicle and counts the number of axles it has. Around there, there's also an ALPR and a USDOT reader[2]. Using the weight, ALPR, and USDOT information, a decision is made as to whether the vehicle is required to check in at the weigh station (which is indicated using a road-side sign). There's no fine yet or anything, vehicles are just flagged for further inspection based on:
- measured weight vs GVWR
- company history / safety rating
- a few other factors that I don't recall off the top of my head
There's a few more ALPR cameras sprinkled throughout the weigh station itself, and another one on the highway past the station. These ones are used to track the motion of the vehicle through the system. For example, if a truck has been flagged to stop, and it instead skips the station and keeps on going, the system knows right away that they've bypassed and can send out an enforcement officer. Alternatively, if the plate is seen at the (more accurate static) scale at the station, the system automatically correlates the weight and the plate, and if it's within range, the driver can sometimes leave without even having to interact with any enforcement officers.
[1] Note that it specifically ignored non-commercial traffic unless there was something really weird going on. Categorically was not keeping persistent records of all traffic.
[2] Funny enough, there's no significant regulations specifying the exact font/size/placement for USDOT information, so a reliable USDOT camera is significantly harder to make than a reliable ALPR.
There's a dead reply to my comment that I'd like to address anyway, in a slightly glib manner:
> How hard would it be to remove those bits that ignored non-commercial traffic?
Code-wise? It'd be really easy to add an INSERT that stuffs extra data into another table. But as far as "removing the bits that ignore non-commercial traffic", none of the non-commercial traffic would be in the datasets provided by the various federal agencies (whose acronyms I forget).
Performance-wise? The whole thing is a giant mass of Oracle PL/SQL that can barely keep up with the commercial traffic. If we tried processing all non-commercial traffic through the scoring algorithms etc, the whole house of cards would fall down :D
How hard would it be to remove those bits that ignored non-commercial traffic? You might be a privacy conscious guy, but what is to stop the owner of this code base from removing this if statement? I am sure a company like Infosys would be happy to take on a project like this, and throw some less liberty minded people at the problem.
I'd love to have personal ALPR on my car: I'd like a heads up when I'm near a crazy driver who has nearly hit me before. Since I drive similar paths, even without noticing, I'm likely to run into the same cars repeatedly. And I'd like to know/log who is pulling into my driveway and when.
If you're not trying to log the movements of the public, the usage is likely moral.
Let's see, you could use it as a supercool way to open your gate and/or garage doors when your own car approaches the entrance. You have a guest visiting? No problem, open the gate for their license plates too.
I use a camera in conjunction with a raspberry pi to announce when someone drives down my driveway. Known license plates it will announce the name of the person driving down the driveway. Unknown license plates it announces that I have an unexpected visitor. I feel like it's pretty useful personally.
Huh? The whole reason license plates exist is to be read. What makes a machine reading it always immoral compared to a human? Particularly the police identifying vehicles they're searching for. Why shouldn't they use technology to help find criminals instead of sitting around watching cars go by with their own eyes?
I once had a problem with my car in a big carpark. I asked the security guard for help and he wanted my license plate number. He typed it into the computer and the camera found my car and panned and zoomed onto it. Amazing! Much easier than trying to explain the location. So there's your non-immoral example and you can stop worrying.
As for privacy. So what? Where are people going in public that's such a secret? If you want to do something secretly, do it in private. If it involves using the public streets, then accept that it's public.
None of those things are really private anyway. Private investigators, police, or stalkers can follow people from their house to wherever they go, and can identify you by your car's appearance even without the license plate. The difference here could be in the scale and ease of access to such data though.
Nobody seems to mind that Google Streetview shows cars. My sister visited her mother in another city at the time they drove past so now there's a permanent record that she was there at that time to anyone who knows what her car looks like. Is that a problem too?
> "Private investigators, police, or stalkers can follow people from their house to wherever they go, and can identify you by your car's appearance even without the license plate."
If we ignore the obvious possibility of blackmailing people who have something (legal) to hide, there's also a huge problem of innocent people being in a wrong place at a wrong time. It's not hard to presume that police would use such database to quickly find everyone with a previous convictions who were in the neighborhood when crime happened, and would then try really hard to connect them to it. Which is great if they pick the right guy right away, but history teaches us that they often don't. Mistakes happen a lot in investigations, and this type of tool - if police trust it too much - could make it even easier for them to jump to conclusions and fall for prejudices. Even if they don't, at the best, it will still create a lot of inconvenience to people who only happened to drive too close to the crime scene in a wrong time. Having police questioning you is very sensitive and unpleasant experience, especially if you're not the white middle-class and you have previous convictions. Police coming to your work can get you fired immediately even if you're completely innocent. Or landlord can kick you out, or wife can leave you. You could easily completely screw up someone's life with this, and still not get any closer to solve the actual crime.
The problem there is the police using bad processes. That's not insolvable. Courts already have processes to protect against some of that cherry picking and prosecutor's fallacy type stuff. Avoiding technology doesn't seem like a sensible solution when safety processes already work in many areas.
If you can legally be fired for having police show up at work, then you're at risk of being fired for any reason and that itself is a problem. Solve that problem with employment protection laws like many countries already have.
You're talking about a wishful thinking, I'm talking about the (for many people rather harsh) reality. I agree, it can (and should) be solved in the ways you mention, but this technology will not wait, it's here now. At the moment it's just incredible how often cops and prosecutors will trick possibly innocent people into plea bargaining to close the cases as quickly as possible and avoid having to prove them guilty in actual trials. Tech that makes it easier to round-up "the usual suspects" will just make it easier for them to do it to an even bigger group of people.
The conflation of privacy and secrecy is an issue that deserves addressing: When you walk into a public restroom stall, it's not really a secret what you're going to do in there. But you still close the door, don't you?
What I'm doing or where I'm going may not be a secret, but that doesn't mean I want the details logged and sold by some data broker.
With the rise of this kind of tech and its prevalence, I think the privacy-focused among us should start pushing to outlaw the use of this tech and eliminate the need for external identification on vehicles.