From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more.

From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more.

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    The readers are smart enough to distinguish between them, so it won’t actually do what you want. You could try to flood the plate with IR and cover the plate with clear-to-human IR reflecting cover. Might work. Might not.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      The readers are just cameras with a sim card and use a simple motion sensor to trigger the camera. All of the processing is server side.

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        I don’t disagree. The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If it’s able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume it’s able to trim excess characters.

        However, I’m not telling you what to do at all. I don’t know how they operate; I’m just making assumptions based on what they said and my knowledge of the processes used. Basically, just adding to the general knowledge pool, so someone smarter than I will have more data to make a more informed decision.

        • PriorityMotif@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          I once saw a teardown of one of the flock safety fixed position cameras, but I’ll be damned as I can’t find it anymore.

          It’s a very simple system, much like a trail camera. It has a motion sensor, a camera, a sim card, a gps module, a battery, and a solar panel.

          They simply stick the pole in the ground along a right of way and the camera knows where it’s at because of the gps, it doesn’t need any kind of wires installed. The camera isn’t super high resolution, it just has a narrow lens on it so that it can capture text. These things are made with inexpensive off the shelf parts. I can’t speak for the Motorola systems, but I image they have some object recognition built in because they are mounted to a vehicle. I believe those are a much older design, but I have seen parts for sale on ebay, so they have probably updated it in the past few years to make it cheaper to produce.

    • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Readers are not smart. They are trained on data with license plates, and I doubt their training had license plates with extra characters on both sides.

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If it’s able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume it’s able to trim excess characters.

        However, I’m not telling you what to do at all. I don’t know how they operate; I’m just making assumptions based on what they said and my knowledge of the processes used. Basically, just adding to the general knowledge pool, so someone smarter than I will have more data to make a more informed decision.

        • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          The article gave me the opposite impression. Basically their database contains lawn signs and bumper stickers on accident - they save all images where text is found but they keep it just in case it had a license plate (because they aren’t sure what is or isn’t a license plate). These kinds of databases are so massive there’s little to no human eyes on images. Anyway I don’t think it would be very hard to send garbage into their database.