- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- news@lemmy.world
From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more.
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Track-me-not, automobile edition.
this kind of thing is why I do not advertise my politics at all. no bumper stickers or yard signs or campaign t shirts. im even registered without a party so you can’t look up my affiliation. and I don’t talk politics on the internet because nothing is truly anonymous. if someone wants to come after you they will be able to find you with enough effort.
Sounds like you’re not loyal enough to The Party. If you were a good citizen, you wouldn’t have anything to hide. Throw him in the gulag!
I wish we could elect people we trust
Hmm. I have a bumper sticker that says “I ❤️ Nuclear War”. I wonder what bucket that puts me in.
The non credible defense bucket.
With enough readers … Your location and minute by minute tracking of your every movement
Or just the phone in your car or on your person.
Which has a pair of nice microphones!
Alright! Dystopian nightmare timeline is a go!
I especially like the part where cops are reported to heavily abuse these databases for personal agendas or to share with criminals. Truly ACAB
This is a very good reason to maintain the appearance of neutrality while facing your local community
This might even be an argument for putting those smoked opaque covers on your license plates even if it’s questionably legal. There’s more than a few people out there with definitely not legal smoked covers to the point you literally can’t read their plates unless you’re tailgating them, and cops don’t give a shit because nobody is ever pulled over for illegal mods. I’d wager that the cameras can’t read them either if you can’t at 10 yards
I’d wager that the cameras can’t read them either if you can’t at 10 yards
I might not take a bet on that. most license plates use reflective paint to aid in this. it would surprise me if paint and cameras are not tuned to at least one non human-visible wavelength.
polarized plate covers, specialized spray coatings, etc may work, but I am not betting my freedom on it. time to go bond style and get rotating plates.
What about a thin e-ink layer plus led layer display that fits over the plate and would block the plate while displaying a digital plate over it? May need a few rounds of evolution there but might work
very cool idea. they will counter with RFID or turn the plate into the equiv of a qrcode. store a cryptographically secure hash of the plate number and you pretty much put an end to that, no?. if I cant get a crypto signed version of your plate, flag the the car as a scofflaw (or worse) and track it as it travels in other ways. I think we are pretty much screwed without a change in laws.
with anti-women laws in some of these states, this is terrifying.
We’re probably decades away from them countering with anything meaningful like that unless large swaths of people start doing it.
I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it
those covers do not effect license plate cameras.
the only people this prevents from view6the numbers are pedestrians and other drivers.
This is and has been a big deal for a while. Do we really want easily trackable movements on every major road? What happens when they start feeding that data into federal fusion centers for cataloging and storage “just in case” they need it later?
What happens when a regime that criminalizes dissent has access to realtime vehicular and individual (via mobile phone) tracking data?
They already do this to flag potential traffickers. I’m not sure what we want has anything to do with what happens.
I’m looking for some adversarial material - numbers and letters at various angles that I can stick to the left and right of my license plate. To a human it will be obvious which part is my license plate but it might be sufficient to confuse an ALPR algorithm.
The readers are smart enough to distinguish between them, so it won’t actually do what you want. You could try to flood the plate with IR and cover the plate with clear-to-human IR reflecting cover. Might work. Might not.
Readers are not smart. They are trained on data with license plates, and I doubt their training had license plates with extra characters on both sides.
The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If it’s able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume it’s able to trim excess characters.
However, I’m not telling you what to do at all. I don’t know how they operate; I’m just making assumptions based on what they said and my knowledge of the processes used. Basically, just adding to the general knowledge pool, so someone smarter than I will have more data to make a more informed decision.
Literally illegal
to modify the license plate itself. but it’s surroundings? why?
What do you think obscuring means?
It varies by state and there are no laws that say it needs to be machine readable. It only needs to be human readable.
This is old news from a decade ago, before the US public was aware how the police had long been fabricating probable cause (and gunning down Americans by the hundreds) and SCOTUS had been carving out exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
Then Trump won in 2016 and we saw what it looked like under mask-off tyranny. And now we’re one election away from one-party autocracy.
The police state is here. It always was. 🌍👨🚀🧑🚀🔫
And now we’re one election away from one-party autocracy.
Pretty this was is also
It always was. 🌍👨🚀🧑🚀🔫
before… SCOTUS had been carving out exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments
They’ve been doing that shit since the country was founded. The fourth and fifth amendments only exist if you’re a rich person and the cops need an excuse not to investigate you.
Drive around with a permanent bike rack in the way of your tail plate. No front plates.
I mean if you’re planning on doing all these weird work arounds, just get a fake plate/mess with your old plates so the letters are more difficult to read.
A bike rack maintains plausible deniability.
Messing with your plates or getting fake plates could land you in court.
I’ve heard of card counters getting stopped by security when they try to walk into a casino, there are definitely ways to “make” someone’s car and put it in a database but the tech is still spotty afaik.
