I wonder where we're supposed to go from here. After 9/11 I worried about having something as convenient as Google Maps. Now we have more real-time surveillance and going outside I know I will be tracked and collected and bought and sold to private companies and the government. There's a psychological cost to knowing you're watched/exploited every time you go outside. In the past this was limited to what people might have seen you do in the public view. Now there are large distributed systems in place to collect an itinerary of your movements - even if you're not the focus of a search. I was born in California, and I don't feel like these systems keep me safer. It makes me want to participate in society less. Maybe I'm just paranoid. I wonder what this at scale, alongside other tracking systems, will do - and how it changes our behavior. I feel harmed by this.
We increasingly manufacture our own deception. Deep fakes, targeted advertising, you name it. We are both the beetle and bottle designers. It is definitely worth thinking about.
It's much easier to design glass bottles than to save beetles from the best and worst time of their lives.
Now, as crafty bottle designer, think of all the stuff you could do, given the necessary resources.
“California malls” is too forgiving a headline. It’s one company, Irvine Company, a group with locations in the Bay Area [1]. They have phone numbers on their websites [2]. Reaching out to their retailers, particularly those with locations in Mexico, couldn’t hurt either.
It might not be a bad idea to also compile a list of their retailers’ investor relations and Twitter accounts and tweet this article to them (here's their store directory [3]). I just started e-mailing the brands I know.
Irvine Company is not just "one company", it's HUGE... it owns half of Orange County, Newport Beach, etc. From Wikipedia:
> The Irvine Company develops suburban master-planned communities throughout central and southern Orange County, in addition to residential buildings in Santa Monica, Silicon Valley, and San Diego.[6] The company also owns and manages office buildings in Milpitas, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Downtown San Diego, Mission Valley, San Diego, La Jolla Village/University City, Sorrento Mesa, Del Mar Heights, Newport Center, UCI locations, West Los Angeles, Pasadena, Chicago, and New York City.[7]
Given this news, I'm going to contact some other large mall chains (e.g. Westfield), in the hopes that they'll confirm that they don't give out license plate data to third parties.
I read articles like this and I think that one's opinion on this is directly correlated with whether one thinks that immigration laws should be enforced. I don't think most people are calling for immigration laws to be eliminated and anyone who manages to make it here should be allowed to stay indefinitely.
What I don't get is the whole selective enforcement of laws thing. If someone somehow managed to get across the border that gets the person some sort of award for sneaking past the border patrol and thus a right to stay here for being a particularly sneaky lawbreaker? The legal reasoning behind all this just strikes me as ridiculously convoluted.
I feel like there are two types of people, those who respect property rights and those who don't.
You might say that one type of person wants everyone to be like docker containers, not interfering with one-another and another type of person wants to be like a monolithic application where anyone's problem becomes everyone's problem, but free resources are to be shared.
> one's opinion on this is directly correlated with whether one thinks that immigration laws should be enforced.
Oh, absolutely. If someone doesn’t like the surveillance state, this is just another datapoint on an ever-increasing list. Still disappointing, but not uniquely so.
The people so civically unengaged that they actively champion the increased surveillance of modern life right up to the point it’s used against their pet causes disgust me.
How is anyone in SV going to eat if private corporations can't track our every move? I mean, not everyone takes cab rides or rents private homes when they travel, but almost everyone uses the internet for something. And those people need to be tracked, or there's no money to be made.
I think it's because it's private property, so they can. I mean they can't just install scanners on a public (gov't) freeway, for example. Some jurisdictions, like Tiburon, in CA, scans every vehicle entering and exiting (only one way in and one way out of town.)
It won't solve the license plate issue, but wearing a burka in public is starting to sound like a sensible response to the modern world just so you don't end up with your face scanned and location logged 38 times on your way to work in the morning.
A niqab might do for now, but I'm guessing height, gate and precise location might provide too much fingerprinting information.
The headline is completely misleading and actually understated the problem. One California mall developer is sharing their license plate data with one third party company which may or may not be sharing this data with other parties. This is worse because
1) companies have gotten so big that one company can control a huge number of shopping malls
2) huge-scale data collection and transmission is so easy/cheap that one decision by one person can affect the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people
3) the “service” model of software delivery makes it much harder to know what is or isn’t being done with the data that you’re generating by using that software
I'm not sure why all of the furor exists over a group of commercial properties doing this. The reality is that there are so many entities collecting this same information at so many places, and selling it to private parties, and keeping historical records for years - that there's not a good way to unring this bell. We just happened to find out about this one and the media is highlighting that ICE purchases the data.
Scores of police departments and other government agencies run ALPR cameras, and share the results with Vigilant and other companies so that they can have access to all of the results that Vigilant holds. Philadelphia PD even ran unmarked vehicles with ALPR equipment bearing a Google Maps logo a few years back.[1]
Repo companies and others are sending out drivers in vehicles with ALPR cameras who patrol mall parking lots, apartment complexes, etc and then upload all of that data to one of several companies including Vigilant. These folks can scan 15,000 plates a day without a lot of effort.
Homeowner associations and apartment complexes (or their security companies) also frequently have these ALPR cameras along the paths of ingress or egress.
Universities are using ALPR for parking enforcement (and then selling the data to companies.)
“Irvine Company is a customer of Vigilant Solutions. Vigilant employs ALPR technology at our three Orange County regional shopping centers. Vigilant is required by contract, and have assured us, that ALPR data collected at these locations is only shared with local police departments as part of their efforts to keep the local community safe.”
The malls in Southern California also use machine vision to detect your gender, approximate age, sentiment and unique facial structure through unique identifier tracking. If they have you from your license plate, to when you’re in the mall, as well as any information they can glean from your cell phone signal... yikes. Or at least there was an article some time ago how they were testing it.
For comparison: in Sweden there was a chain of gas stations who installed plate recognition cameras to record people who didn't pay for the gas (if you opt to pay cash, you get to fill your car first and pay later, with this system in place the clerks could refuse that you got to fill up your car first if your plate showed up in a search).
The Swedish agency of data regulation was able to challenge the system in court and got the chain to dismantle the system, and with fines added to that. This was a couple of years ago, long before GDPR.
Something like this would absolutely not fly on this side of the pond, and I'm very glad about that.
I'm a little confused about the mall operator's incentive to do this.
Are they using ALPR for their own security and voluntarily sharing the reads? Is the provider giving them a discount to do so or paying to place cameras or something?
This article takes a distinctly negative tone towards this practice. What’s the problem here? License plate data is public information, it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else. There should not be any expectation of privacy in regard to one’s license plate or the location of its sighting.
> There should not be any expectation of privacy in regard to one’s license plate or the location of its sighting
The Supreme Court has continuously recognized the difference between manual and sustained, remote and automated tracking, even in public spaces [1]. The "seismic shifts in digital technology" we are presently undergoing require vigilance to be maintained in respect of the Bill of Rights.
The US Supreme Court just made the distinction, when ruling that access to a cellular telephone carrier's location data for a particular subscriber required a warrant (and hence a showing of probable cause):
The Government’s position fails to contend
with the seismic shifts in digital technology
that made possible the tracking of not only
Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s,
not for a short period but for years and years.
Sprint Corporation and its competitors are not
your typical witnesses. Unlike the nosy neighbor
who keeps an eye on comings and goings, they
are ever alert, and their memory is nearly
infallible.
_Carpenter v. United States_, No. 16-402 (June 22, 2018) (Slip Op., at 15)
That's the difference, beyond simple public/private. It's not that the license plate display itself is private but storing the data forever and being nearly infallible amounts to an unreasonable intrusion on privacy when handed over to the government. Notably, the USSC in a 9-0 ruling from 2012 held that attaching a GPS tracker to a car also required a warrant. _United States v. Jones, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012).
it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else.
It really isn't though, is it? There is a bunch of policy and law here that remains to be worked out, but large scale ubiquitous surveillance and storage of your public "footprint" is really not the same thing as a person having been able in the past to follow you around and take notes.
This is one of the areas where scaling really matters, and you can do many things with these sort of databases that were simply intractable before. So I find the conceit that it is "just the same" to be inept.
I don't know where the courts and legislators are eventually going to arrive at on this, but if it is as cut and dried as you suggest then you can look forward to a near future where anyone who cares to can buy a detailed dossier on all of your movements for the last decade, say, with known and inferred contacts, assets, etc. It probably won't be very expensive.
> What’s the problem here? License plate data is public information, it’s the same as if a person standing on the street saw your plate and told someone else.
Cool, so you won't mind if i install a GPS tracker in your car that tells me your vehicle's location 24/7, since the exact same information can be gleaned from "a person on the street seeing your plate"?
The problem with ALPR is that it allows a few, otherwise occupied people -- such as parking lot attendants or repo agents or policemen -- to drive around like they normally do and automatically collect massive amounts of data on vehicles and their location without incurring any cost on their behalf (beyond "slightly decreased fuel efficiency because the ALPR equipment needs power from the alternator").
The same act of "looking at a license plate and noting down the location" becomes an entirely different thing when conducted at massive scale and at negligible cost.
It's government surveillance. The mall can collect and record whatever data they want on their property, who cares. We can compel our government to not accept and blindly process this data en masse. It's the same as taking bulk data from Facebook, or Google, and looking for the .0001% that points to a criminal. Many, myself included, believe that this is wrong.
Do you consider your location data to be private? If you are out in public all day then all it takes is every business everywhere using facial recognition and conglomerating their results together to monitor your position throughout the entire day. Are you comfortable with that?
There are boundaries between reasonable use of nominally public information and the normal expectation of some degree of privacy outside the home.
Let’s say we’re neighbors. I keep a close watch on your house, and every time you come and go I phone the local police and tell them, “OceanKing just got home” or whatever. Would you be ok with that?
Just because there shouldn't be an expectation of privacy doesn't mean we have to be happy when it's revealed that a private company is tracking this stuff en masse.
> A hallmark of Vigilant’s solution, the ability for agencies to share real-time data nationwide amongst over 1,000 agencies and tap into our exclusive commercial LPR database of over 5 billion vehicle detections, sets our platform apart.
5 Billion vehicle detections seems like an awfully high (and possibly made up) number. Even if you allow for the same vehicle to be detected 5 or 10 times, the total number of registered vehicles in US was barely around 300 million.[1]
And one day the community realised that technical innovations had deeper ramifications than something to nerd over or some fancy valuation in a startup with a quirky name.
As an industry, software is still very young. And as it comes of age in the modern era, its impact continues to reach further and further into the fabric of society. We are more than ever before making ethical questions part of the conversation when developing technology.
Politics and policies making their way into HN is therefore an inevitable evolution. Nothing else.
This is the first thing I've read that actually increased my support for the widespread use ALPR technology. Every illegal alien in this country is a criminal, by definition.
Hopefully you've never gotten a speeding ticket, parking or similar. Because most of those are classified at the same misdemeanor level as "entering illegally", which would make you a criminal, too.
[+] [-] blitmap|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinchuco|7 years ago|reply
This common saying.
I'd rather be paranoid and informed than blissfully ignorant. But a person can only process so much while carrying on with their lives.
The jewel beetle attempts to mate with an amber glass bottle it finds attractive until it dies from exhaustion.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...
We increasingly manufacture our own deception. Deep fakes, targeted advertising, you name it. We are both the beetle and bottle designers. It is definitely worth thinking about.
It's much easier to design glass bottles than to save beetles from the best and worst time of their lives.
Now, as crafty bottle designer, think of all the stuff you could do, given the necessary resources.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|7 years ago|reply
It might not be a bad idea to also compile a list of their retailers’ investor relations and Twitter accounts and tweet this article to them (here's their store directory [3]). I just started e-mailing the brands I know.
[1] https://www.shopirvinecompany.com/centers/
[2] https://www.shopirvinecompany.com/about/contact/
[3] https://www.shopirvinecompany.com/directory/store-directory/
[+] [-] zzleeper|7 years ago|reply
> The Irvine Company develops suburban master-planned communities throughout central and southern Orange County, in addition to residential buildings in Santa Monica, Silicon Valley, and San Diego.[6] The company also owns and manages office buildings in Milpitas, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Downtown San Diego, Mission Valley, San Diego, La Jolla Village/University City, Sorrento Mesa, Del Mar Heights, Newport Center, UCI locations, West Los Angeles, Pasadena, Chicago, and New York City.[7]
[+] [-] ipsin|7 years ago|reply
I'll be interested to see how they respond.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CzechTech|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] matte_black|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|7 years ago|reply
What I don't get is the whole selective enforcement of laws thing. If someone somehow managed to get across the border that gets the person some sort of award for sneaking past the border patrol and thus a right to stay here for being a particularly sneaky lawbreaker? The legal reasoning behind all this just strikes me as ridiculously convoluted.
[+] [-] test6554|7 years ago|reply
You might say that one type of person wants everyone to be like docker containers, not interfering with one-another and another type of person wants to be like a monolithic application where anyone's problem becomes everyone's problem, but free resources are to be shared.
[+] [-] finnthehuman|7 years ago|reply
Oh, absolutely. If someone doesn’t like the surveillance state, this is just another datapoint on an ever-increasing list. Still disappointing, but not uniquely so.
The people so civically unengaged that they actively champion the increased surveillance of modern life right up to the point it’s used against their pet causes disgust me.
[+] [-] Skunkleton|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverige|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|7 years ago|reply
A niqab might do for now, but I'm guessing height, gate and precise location might provide too much fingerprinting information.
[+] [-] megablast|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weaksauce|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggg9990|7 years ago|reply
1) companies have gotten so big that one company can control a huge number of shopping malls
2) huge-scale data collection and transmission is so easy/cheap that one decision by one person can affect the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people
3) the “service” model of software delivery makes it much harder to know what is or isn’t being done with the data that you’re generating by using that software
[+] [-] nerdponx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npi|7 years ago|reply
Scores of police departments and other government agencies run ALPR cameras, and share the results with Vigilant and other companies so that they can have access to all of the results that Vigilant holds. Philadelphia PD even ran unmarked vehicles with ALPR equipment bearing a Google Maps logo a few years back.[1]
Repo companies and others are sending out drivers in vehicles with ALPR cameras who patrol mall parking lots, apartment complexes, etc and then upload all of that data to one of several companies including Vigilant. These folks can scan 15,000 plates a day without a lot of effort.
Homeowner associations and apartment complexes (or their security companies) also frequently have these ALPR cameras along the paths of ingress or egress.
Universities are using ALPR for parking enforcement (and then selling the data to companies.)
[1]https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kb77dm/philly-pol...
[+] [-] grizzles|7 years ago|reply
“Irvine Company is a customer of Vigilant Solutions. Vigilant employs ALPR technology at our three Orange County regional shopping centers. Vigilant is required by contract, and have assured us, that ALPR data collected at these locations is only shared with local police departments as part of their efforts to keep the local community safe.”
From:https://www.irvinecompany.com/press-release/irvine-company-s...
[+] [-] sixdimensional|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixdimensional|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimmen|7 years ago|reply
The Swedish agency of data regulation was able to challenge the system in court and got the chain to dismantle the system, and with fines added to that. This was a couple of years ago, long before GDPR.
Something like this would absolutely not fly on this side of the pond, and I'm very glad about that.
[+] [-] darpa_escapee|7 years ago|reply
This has been the case for at least 5+ years, now.
[+] [-] danhorner|7 years ago|reply
Are they using ALPR for their own security and voluntarily sharing the reads? Is the provider giving them a discount to do so or paying to place cameras or something?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] OceanKing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|7 years ago|reply
The Supreme Court has continuously recognized the difference between manual and sustained, remote and automated tracking, even in public spaces [1]. The "seismic shifts in digital technology" we are presently undergoing require vigilance to be maintained in respect of the Bill of Rights.
[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-hol...
[+] [-] mark212|7 years ago|reply
That's the difference, beyond simple public/private. It's not that the license plate display itself is private but storing the data forever and being nearly infallible amounts to an unreasonable intrusion on privacy when handed over to the government. Notably, the USSC in a 9-0 ruling from 2012 held that attaching a GPS tracker to a car also required a warrant. _United States v. Jones, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012).
[+] [-] ska|7 years ago|reply
This is one of the areas where scaling really matters, and you can do many things with these sort of databases that were simply intractable before. So I find the conceit that it is "just the same" to be inept.
I don't know where the courts and legislators are eventually going to arrive at on this, but if it is as cut and dried as you suggest then you can look forward to a near future where anyone who cares to can buy a detailed dossier on all of your movements for the last decade, say, with known and inferred contacts, assets, etc. It probably won't be very expensive.
[+] [-] zkms|7 years ago|reply
Cool, so you won't mind if i install a GPS tracker in your car that tells me your vehicle's location 24/7, since the exact same information can be gleaned from "a person on the street seeing your plate"?
The problem with ALPR is that it allows a few, otherwise occupied people -- such as parking lot attendants or repo agents or policemen -- to drive around like they normally do and automatically collect massive amounts of data on vehicles and their location without incurring any cost on their behalf (beyond "slightly decreased fuel efficiency because the ALPR equipment needs power from the alternator").
The same act of "looking at a license plate and noting down the location" becomes an entirely different thing when conducted at massive scale and at negligible cost.
[+] [-] gramstrong|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
There are boundaries between reasonable use of nominally public information and the normal expectation of some degree of privacy outside the home.
[+] [-] mikeash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s73v3r_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matte_black|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] User23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrissnell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] justboxing|7 years ago|reply
5 Billion vehicle detections seems like an awfully high (and possibly made up) number. Even if you allow for the same vehicle to be detected 5 or 10 times, the total number of registered vehicles in US was barely around 300 million.[1]
Or did I mis-interpret that statement / claim ?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle...
[+] [-] MatrixAlgebra|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nodesocket|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nstart|7 years ago|reply
As an industry, software is still very young. And as it comes of age in the modern era, its impact continues to reach further and further into the fabric of society. We are more than ever before making ethical questions part of the conversation when developing technology.
Politics and policies making their way into HN is therefore an inevitable evolution. Nothing else.
[+] [-] iosDrone|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireBeyond|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]