A week ago I was sitting at work and a civilian car drove by the office window with a plate reader system and went up and down every row of cars in our parking lot.
The car was obviously trespassing, you can't be on the property unless you're a tenant or guest. But due to the spongy ethics of tech companies, I'm sure my license plate is uploaded to some database and people know exactly where I work and what time I'm away from my house.
Does your office or property management company hire someone to do parking enforcement or security? It would not surprise me to learn that they’re subcontracting the task of identifying cars which aren’t on a list somewhere.
With a digital license plate it should be possible to display a random number or no number while in those locations(work or mall parking lots, your driveway, etc.,) where there is no legal requirement to show the plate number. Alternatively the digital plate could be configured to flash the plate number at an interval longer than the typical plate reader vehicle takes to pass your parked vehicle. That would at least cut down on the capture rate of government and auto loan companies that cruise parking lots which is a good portion of all scanning activity. Unless the digital plate is reporting it's location via cell network.
I was just thinking the other day that we need to have e-ink based license plates. The plate number could be generated and changed every n minutes. There would have to be a government run system that would be able to link the generated number to the owner of the car, but hopefully there'd be some checks, balances and logging on the use of it (ie: a warrant would be required, etc). It wouldn't prevent a government from abusing it, but at least private companies scanning activities would be rendered null.
Always been a dicey business. I'd worked on one back in the 80's(!) and the issue then was, bumper stickers that had the same aspect ration as a license plate. Plus license plate frames (which must by law not cover any part of the plate with info on them, but often do anyway).
Someone tested this shirt out on EasyALPR Parking Enforcer a recently and it did scan. (I’m putting EasyALPR through Startup School right now)
I was wondering about it—-though it was only tested against the image of the shirt, I suspect it would be picked up at close enough range.
Most of my work is creating great workflow for handling incorrect or unwanted data gathered using alpr on iOS.
If you were waltzing through a the parking lot of one of my commercial property customers and a patroller somehow scanned you—-some admin later that day might frown for a few moments before marking the “vehicle sighting” invalid.
That would likely run into problems with anti-mask laws. However, it might be possible to either skirt around it with socially acceptable masks (e.g. smog masks) or to get away with it if one is a member of a more privileged group.
Usually they don't have any filter, so they can work at night on the IR spectrum. A baseball cap with a string of SMD LEDs on the edge should do the trick, at least at night. During the day, a cap and a surgical mask will do it. If you go indoors, remove the mask and keep your head low, since most cameras are on the roof.
That particular pattern looks like it came out of the Hyperface project.[1]
Also here's an actual purchaseable link at RedBubble [2]. No affiliation with the seller (nor does it look like they're connected to the original project).
how does this help unless the license plates are valid? And multiple people have your plate on their shirt and are walking in front of readers all across the country?
If you got two different shirts displaying two different plates, you could flip a coin each morning to decide which one to wear before starting your daily jog down the freeway.
I think the parent wanted to point out that it’s fairly trivial to blacklist the plates on these shirts and thus remove the injected data. The number of available plates on the shirts is limited, likely they’re not valid plates either.
It would likely be more expensive, but it seems plausible that it would be possible to manufacture shirts that each have a random license plate number. That would at least make it so that they would have to make the blacklisting local to the area where a given shirt owner regularly travels.
individually would be prohibitive, but specifying a different set of plates on each order from the supplier shouldn't be too hard. The printing is done digitally anyway, as long as the cuts don't change it should be trivial to specify a new pattern.
disclaimer: I have very little idea about the details, I've just advised startups that got clothing manufactured offshore.
That would only really work for the distributor of these shirts, as it would add enough random/inaccurate data to make the real data meaningless. If you made your own with your plate on it, it'd just help the cops identify where you were even when not in your car.
It's very unlikely, unless you mass distributed a shirt with your plate, that you could inject enough junk data for your plate to make distinguishing the real data impossible. And while junk plates may add a tiny bit of additional data storage, it's unlikely to actually disadvantage the cops in any way pulling up the data they want on real cars.
They have no real reason to blacklist a plate just because someone put it on a shirt.
The car was obviously trespassing, you can't be on the property unless you're a tenant or guest. But due to the spongy ethics of tech companies, I'm sure my license plate is uploaded to some database and people know exactly where I work and what time I'm away from my house.