Intentionally building a database whose sold purpose is to track tens of millions of mostly-innocent people as they go about their business for years on end is a bad idea.
Seems like a system that's destined to be rife with false positives. I can only see this data being misused by lawyers and law enforcement to support a bad assumption. Anyone with a basic familiarity with statistics knows misinterpreting is remarkably easy to do; misrepresenting it is even easier. I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case.
>I'd hate to have a coincidental pattern become "proof" in some kind of court case.
Especially when the pattern is what the cops use to identify the suspect in the first place.
There is a real problem with big data in the courtroom. Take the intersection of a victim, a crime and a suspect and look at a million data points and you'll find several thousand that match. Put only those in front of a jury and you have something that looks like a mountain of evidence but is really just systematically applying confirmation bias to random noise.
Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated.
Humorously your smartphone probably is tracking you (with a much higher correlation with people, and accuracy, than vehicles), and logging it for years on end.
And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been (this usually causes wildfire in most forums as the natural result is to hysterically proclaim that one can only allow some monitoring if they allow any and all monitoring for anyone, which is a nonsensical dichotomy). I can rationally see that there could be a lot of uses for it, in fact, in modernizing investigations and law enforcement.
Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).
Putting every car into the database will generate the maximum number of conflicts of interest possible. If a database only has interesting or suspicious plates in it, an average cop might not browse the database for funsies (risking a hit on the next audit). But if everyone the cop knows is in there, they might check up on spouses, exes, cute girls' habits, old bosses, friend's bosses... the list of reasons to risk a peek is endless.
The flip side is I'd rather be found by idle browsers in a database of everyone than a database of people considered (sometimes arbitrarily) as suspicious. Ultimately the thoroughness of auditing lookups and clarity about what is and isn't acceptable enquiry is more important than who is in the database and how many months of data is accessible.
Rogue cops might be able to misuse access to the system out of sheer curiosity but similarly rogue employees in certain positions at [mobile] telephone companies can abuse their position to tracking your whereabouts and call history, and financial organizations have access to your transaction history and card numbers - both far more sensitive than a few isolated datapoints from when your car passes police vehicles with their cameras switched on. I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.
Presuming that it has appropriate checks and balances. e.g. audited access and look-ups, with every plate-holder having the right to use that same information themselves (whether the history of spots, and every look-up of the same).
> Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles.
Nope, they track people, too. According to the article, "just four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time)" can uniquely identify an individual person 95% of the time. When you live in a place where cars are the only practical way of getting around (like the LA area), then this is de facto person tracking.
> Monitoring license plates don't track people. They track vehicles. Vehicles that are heavily regulated.
The owner of the vehicle is identifiable through owner's documents and insurance and etc. The driver of the vehicle is identified either through a police office confirming ID, or by a camera taking a photograph of the driver, or people making sworn statements and risking jail time if they lie.
She lied and said she was driving, so she took his penalty. They both got prison sentences for that lie.
> And honestly I don't care whether there is a database of places where my car has been
At the moment there's probably no need to care. Would you care if you were living in a little tin-pot country where kidnap was common and corruption was rife?
As you say there are plenty of uses for this data. How about some that inconvenience you? Demographics to target billboard ads along your route? Introduction of toll roads for traffic management?
