While people put signs on their lawns or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people about their views and potentially influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says they are intended for “human-scale visibility,” not machine-scale. “They may want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don’t necessarily want to be logged into a national database that police authorities have access to,” Stanley says.
Weist says the system should at least be able to filter out images that don’t contain license plate data and not make errors. “Any number of times is too many, especially when it comes to finding things like people’s clothes or signs on lawns,” Weist says.
“License plate recognition (LPR) technology supports public safety and social services, from helping locate abducted children and stolen vehicles to automating fare collection and lowering insurance premiums by reducing insurance fraud,” Jeremiah Wheeler, president of DRN, said in a statement.
Weist believes that given the relatively diminutive number of photos showing bumper stickers compared to the huge number of vehicles with them, Motorola Solutions may be trying to filter out images that contain 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 search results show images of houses with lawn signs but no observable vehicles, or whether filters are used to limitations of such 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 data that is recorded in public places and visible to all. Access is limited to customers with specific purposes permitted by law, and access is terminated for violators.”
Artificial intelligence everywhere
License plate recognition systems have advanced in recent years as cameras have decreased in size and machine learning algorithms have improved. These systems such as DRN and competing Flockthey are part of a change in the way people are surveilled as they move around cities and neighborhoods.
Increasingly, CCTV cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence that monitors people’s movements and even detects their emotions. The systems have the potential to alert officials, who may not be able to constantly monitor CCTV footage, to real-world events. But can license plate recognition reduce crime? has been questioned.
“When government or private companies promote license plate readers, it gives the impression that the technology only finds criminals, carjacking suspects or people involved in an Amber Alert, but the technology simply doesn’t work that way,” says Dave Maass, director investigator for the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Technology collects everyone’s data and often stores it for huge periods of time.”
Technology may also become more effective over time. Maass who did it long studied license plate recognition systems, says companies are now trying to do “vehicle fingerprinting,” which determines the make, model and year of a vehicle based on its shape, as well as determining whether the vehicle is damaged. DRN’s product pages state that an upcoming update will allow insurance companies to check whether a car is covered used for ridesharing.
“The way this country was set up was designed to protect our citizens from government overreach, but it hasn’t done much to protect us from private entities running a business to make money.” – Nicole McConlogue, associate professor of law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who researched license plate surveillance systems and their solutions potential for discrimination.
“The extent to which they are able to do this is really concerning,” McConlogue said of vehicles driving on the streets collecting images. “By doing this, you motivate the people collecting the data. But also in the United States you carry with you the legacy of segregation and redlining because it has left its mark on the composition of neighborhoods.”