"It's far past time for our court systems to catch up and realize that when people are deploying these AI systems in the public space, they are stripping countless bystanders of their privacy.The story goes that just before Jaguar debuted the E-Type in 1961, the company asked the British government for an exemption from affixing the mandatory front plate. "When we create this panopticon of vehicle tracking, you create the opportunity to track innocent people in public," said Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. While it offers all these amenities for ALPR owners for the comforts of their own homes, privacy advocates warn that this technology's expansion will create a chilling effect beyond the owner's doorsteps. For example, he suggested the cameras could pick up your license plate when you arrive home and automatically adjust the thermostat inside. With Watchman, he's envisioned ALPRs as a convenience, a tool that could integrate with smart home tech like the Google Nest and the ![]() His customers have used license plate readers for car washes and parking lots and considered using it for drive-thrus, so that fast food chains could remember returning customers. That's between the police and their community."īerman doesn't see his company's ALPR as a surveillance tool, despite the technology's historical use for tracking and locating people. "The homeowners might want the police to do that. "That's probably something police could do and probably something they want to do," Berman said. He also noted that police could use ALPRs from people's homes to help with investigations, like asking private citizens to add a specific car's license plate to their watch lists and provide officers with any data available. On OpenALPR's premium version, police can access people's license plate reader data if customers choose to opt in, which customers have done, Berman said. License plate readers presented a privacy concern even when they were only in law enforcement's hands, because the technology allowed for constant tracking of public spaces. Rekor says the ALPR technology is easy to install and can work for any internet-connected camera. "Once you install the hardware, it becomes so cheap and easy to add more and more invasive and dystopian technology on top of that." Police ties "This is what we always feared with the proliferation of these private surveillance systems," said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. By pricing Watchman lower than a Netflix subscription, the company is aiming to get this technology in as many homes as possible. The explosion of internet-connected cameras in household products likeĬam, which are installed on doorsteps and gaze onto the world, made Watchman possible, Berman said.Īdding his company's license plate reading software to those devices seemed like a logical next step, Berman said. "This especially poses a problem if your ALPR covers a road that leads to the parking lot of a law firm or a mental health facility."Ī driver also has no say in being logged by someone's license plate reader, or even the knowledge that their vehicle was being tracked. "Even with just one ALPR set up in front of your house, it is enough to be able to learn about people - to see their patterns of movement, when they come down your street, at what time, what cars they drive - which is information that can be used to infer incredibly personal things about a person," Guariglia said. ![]() But even that would be enough for privacy concerns, said the EFF's Guariglia. Police have access to names, addresses and location history when they use license plate readers, but the average citizen won't, he said.Ī private user will only be able to get the license plate number and an alert each time it's detected, Berman said. While Berman said Watchman's ALPR is just as effective as the law enforcement edition, he noted key differences between the two versions. ![]() "I just don't think anybody's going to do that." "If someone wants to invest an effort to do it, I think anything's possible," he said. ![]() Berman doesn't believe that scenario is likely. That person would have to watch hours of footage, pause every time a car passed, write down the number and then log it into Watchman. Only OpenALPR's premium customers, who pay $50 a month instead of $5, can flag every car not on a customer's list.Įven though the home edition doesn't log every car that drives by, Berman acknowledged that a dedicated person would be able to discover the license plates of all passing cars using Rekor's technology. Berman said the system isn't constantly monitoring cars that pass by.
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