The seven-character pattern California has used for 45 years will finally run out of combinations in 2025, two years earlier than expected. But America's largest car market has a plan.
Just changing to a new numbering system when they run out.
Can’t say I agree. This is anecdotal but the council installed some camera-like devices on one of the main roads in my city and people got scared of them and slowed down as a result. I don’t think the cameras are actually turned on and issuing fines as I don’t know any people who have gotten a fine from them, but their presence scares people into safer driving.
Automated law enforcement in fields where guilt can be obviously and objectively determined (resist the urge to make a fallacious slippery slope argument) is, on average, a good thing. People’s tendency to bad behaviour is strictly because they think they won’t get caught. Telling people there’s a $500 fine for speeding means nothing because they know the chance of getting caught is in the neighbourhood of 1 in 10,000. Most people speed every day on every road they drive on but they get maybe 1 ticket every other year. But if they know that speeding on one particular road will result in a 90% chance of getting a $50 fine, they’re not going to speed on that road. That’s why the cameras are usually painted bright orange or white—to get people to see them and think “oh shit, I don’t want a ticket; I’d better slow down”.
As long as we have democratic control over our own local governments and strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used, I do not view misuse of automated number plate recognition systems as a serious threat. In fact, I think it’s probably a net bonus. There’s a show called Police Interceptors which follows British police and it’s absolutely shocking how many stolen cars they recover because someone drove it past an automated number plate recognition camera and it got flagged.
strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used
In practice this just isn’t going to work, because the whole infrastructure is aligned against effective privacy such that you can’t just pass a simple law to ensure it. What I’ve heard from someone working in local government is that right now there is an overwhelming push to move all computer systems to the cloud (private company servers and software), and most of them are there already, which means that the actual people, practices, and physical hardware managing data are at multiple levels of remove from democratic scrutiny and influence. Also consider the high profile recent events regarding collection and misuse of existing data by the US federal government regardless of laws prohibiting it. None of the information collected and stored by the government (or corporations for that matter) is safe, and the task of making it safe becomes more impractical all the time.
Of course these are also problems that would be good to address, but I think you can’t count on them being resolved because they probably will not be. Which isn’t to say good laws on what data isn’t safe to be collected to begin with, or what decisions affecting people’s lives aren’t safe to be made by computers, are likely either, but that at least seems like a more realistic approach to me than trying to build a Panopticon that somehow doesn’t get abused.
Can’t say I agree. This is anecdotal but the council installed some camera-like devices on one of the main roads in my city and people got scared of them and slowed down as a result. I don’t think the cameras are actually turned on and issuing fines as I don’t know any people who have gotten a fine from them, but their presence scares people into safer driving.
Automated law enforcement in fields where guilt can be obviously and objectively determined (resist the urge to make a fallacious slippery slope argument) is, on average, a good thing. People’s tendency to bad behaviour is strictly because they think they won’t get caught. Telling people there’s a $500 fine for speeding means nothing because they know the chance of getting caught is in the neighbourhood of 1 in 10,000. Most people speed every day on every road they drive on but they get maybe 1 ticket every other year. But if they know that speeding on one particular road will result in a 90% chance of getting a $50 fine, they’re not going to speed on that road. That’s why the cameras are usually painted bright orange or white—to get people to see them and think “oh shit, I don’t want a ticket; I’d better slow down”.
As long as we have democratic control over our own local governments and strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used, I do not view misuse of automated number plate recognition systems as a serious threat. In fact, I think it’s probably a net bonus. There’s a show called Police Interceptors which follows British police and it’s absolutely shocking how many stolen cars they recover because someone drove it past an automated number plate recognition camera and it got flagged.
In practice this just isn’t going to work, because the whole infrastructure is aligned against effective privacy such that you can’t just pass a simple law to ensure it. What I’ve heard from someone working in local government is that right now there is an overwhelming push to move all computer systems to the cloud (private company servers and software), and most of them are there already, which means that the actual people, practices, and physical hardware managing data are at multiple levels of remove from democratic scrutiny and influence. Also consider the high profile recent events regarding collection and misuse of existing data by the US federal government regardless of laws prohibiting it. None of the information collected and stored by the government (or corporations for that matter) is safe, and the task of making it safe becomes more impractical all the time.
Of course these are also problems that would be good to address, but I think you can’t count on them being resolved because they probably will not be. Which isn’t to say good laws on what data isn’t safe to be collected to begin with, or what decisions affecting people’s lives aren’t safe to be made by computers, are likely either, but that at least seems like a more realistic approach to me than trying to build a Panopticon that somehow doesn’t get abused.