While people put up signs in their yards or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people of their views and potentially influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says it’s intended for “human-scale visibility.” “, not to that of machines. “They may want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don’t necessarily want to be registered in a national database that law enforcement can access,” Stanley says.
Weist says the system, at a minimum, should be able to filter out images that do not contain license plate data and not make errors. “Any number of times is too many, especially when it comes to finding things like what people are wearing or lawn signs,” Weist says.
“License plate recognition (LPR) technology supports public safety and community services, from helping find kidnapped children and stolen vehicles to automating toll collection and reducing insurance premiums by mitigating insurance fraud,” says Jeremiah DRN President Wheeler said in a statement. .
Weist believes that given the relatively small number of images showing bumper stickers compared to the large number of vehicles that have them, Motorola Solutions may be attempting to filter images containing bumper stickers or other text.
Wheeler did not respond to WIRED’s questions about whether there are limits on what can be searched in license plate databases, why images of houses with lawn signs but no vehicles in sight appeared in search results, or if filters are used to reduce these images.
“DRNsights complies with all applicable laws and regulations,” says Wheeler. “The DRNsights tool allows authorized parties to access license plate information and associated vehicle information that is captured in public locations and visible to everyone. Access is restricted to customers for certain purposes permitted by law, and those who violate these purposes have their access revoked.”
AI everywhere
License plate recognition systems have flourished in recent years as cameras have gotten smaller and machine learning algorithms have improved. These systems, like DRN and rivals Herdmarks part of a shift in the way people are monitored as they move through cities and neighborhoods.
Increasingly, CCTV cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence to monitor people’s movements and even detect their emotions. The systems have the potential to alert officials, who may not be able to constantly monitor CCTV footage, to real-world events. However, can license plate recognition reduce crime? has been questioned.
“When the government or private companies promote license plate readers, they give the impression that the technology is only looking for lawbreakers or people suspected of stealing a car or involved in an Amber Alert, but that’s not how the technology works,” he says. Dave Maass. , research director at the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Technology collects everyone’s data and stores it often for immense periods of time.”
Over time, technology can also become more capable. Maass, who has researched for a long time license plate recognition systems, says companies are now trying to take “vehicle fingerprints,” where they determine the make, model and year of the vehicle based on its shape and also determine if there is damage to the vehicle. DRN’s product pages say that an upcoming update will allow insurance companies to see if a car is being used for ride sharing.
“The way the country is set up was to protect citizens from government overreach, but not many measures have been put in place to protect us from private actors who are in business to make money,” Nicole McConlogue, associate professor of right. at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who has researched license plate surveillance systems and their discrimination potential.
“The volume at which they are able to do this is what makes it really concerning,” McConlogue says of the vehicles moving through the streets collecting images. “When you do that, you’re taking away the incentives of the people who collect the data. But also, in the United States, it carries with it the legacy of segregation and redlining, because that left a mark on the makeup of neighborhoods.”