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.

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.

  • @[email protected]English
    133•2 months ago

    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

    • @nnullzzEnglish
      67•2 months ago

      The real dystopian nightmare is the one where everyone conforms and acts neutral out of fear. That’s how we really lose who we are and any sense of improving the situation.

      • sunzu2
        9•2 months ago

        There are other ways to resist, esp in the days of the internet.

        Modern tech permits state actors to obtain real life information about your where abouts. This tech now appears to be percolating to street police. There is a lot of abuse already happening but we are several big cases away before the daddy sam tryied to reign this shit in, if ever.

        Point being got to be careful when dealing with the state or other quasi state insinuations as such corporation. Remember when Chevron got a lawyer with some bullshit criminal conviction with a private prosecutors as retaliation about his work on case against them in LatAm?

    • qprimedEnglish
      19•2 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]English
        7•2 months ago

        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

        • qprimedEnglish
          9•2 months ago

          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.

          • RedjardEnglish
            5•2 months ago

            You could just copy others signed codes, so you would also need some sort of totp system.
            Then you could still place some camera capturing and streaming plates of parked cars in real time, so you’d either need 2 way communication with the license plates, where the cameraa tell them to show a code for some specific nonce, and which you could then potentially still stream so would also need severe latency checks, or you would have to get way more reliable gps and make that part of the totp.

            • qprimedEnglish
              6•2 months ago

              • plate number is tied to a VIN which describes the make/model. (sir, this is a wendys toyota. where is the honda?)

              • replies not required from the plate - plate has a specialized qrcode printed across the entire plate (infrared reflector?) with an identifier (lic + other public info?) and signed with an RSA keypair - reader can authenticate the information and a qrcode read counts as a verifiably good read

              • …or just ship RFID tags in the yearly inspection stickers - same cryptographic concept

              none of this is hard or costly. only impediment is public rejection and we all know that can be managed.

          • @[email protected]English
            4•2 months ago

            We’re probably decades away from them countering with anything meaningful like that unless large swaths of people start doing it.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•2 months ago

        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

    • @Landless2029English
      4•2 months ago

      I wonder if it would be illegal to put IR lights around your plate to blind the camera …

      Gears turning…

      Yep. Then automatic tolls and traffic cams can’t track you. Cop would pull you over real quick.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•2 months ago

        If you rtfa you’d see there is already an easy workaround for this. You just need to be driving faster than 150mph and the camera can’t read the plate.

        Also, this isn’t what the article is about. I think it bad enough there is a network of cops and scumbags (guess that’s redundant) recording all this LP data into the DRN network, but it’s being abused to go well beyond LP data as a free for all search of acquired imagery.

    • JoYoEnglish
      3•2 months ago

      those covers do not effect license plate cameras.

      the only people this prevents from viewing the numbers are pedestrians and other drivers.