Big Data

There are eyes everywhere:

Images collected nationwide by DRN Data—a license-plate recognition (LPR) company owned by Motorola Solutions—go far beyond what you might expect from an LPR. A report in Wired this week details how DRN's vehicle-mounted cameras go everywhere and take pictures and videos of everything. You're probably already used to that sort of thing, sad to say, thanks to companies like Google and Apple sending out their camera cars to keep their GPS navigation mapping apps up-to-date. But Wired's investigation into DRN shows there's so much more going on under the hood.

Another image taken on a different day by a different vehicle shows a “Steelworkers for Harris-Walz” sign stuck in the lawn in front of someone’s home. A construction worker, with his face unblurred, is pictured near another Harris sign. Other photos show Trump and Biden (including “F*ck Biden”) bumper stickers on the back of trucks and cars across America. One photo, taken in November 2023, shows a partially torn bumper sticker supporting the Obama-Biden lineup. These images were generated by AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and trucks, initially designed to capture license plates, but which are now photographing political lawn signs outside private homes, individuals wearing T-shirts with text, and vehicles displaying pro-abortion bumper stickers—all while recording the precise locations of these observations. Newly obtained data reviewed by WIRED shows how a tool originally intended for traffic enforcement has evolved into a system capable of monitoring speech protected by the US Constitution.

But it isn't the images themselves that are concerning. The same AI tech that lets your smartphone copy text out of a photograph allows DRN's servers to "read" much more than just license plates. In a statement to Wired, DRN said the company complies with "all applicable laws and regulations," which is no comfort for any American with privacy concerns since the law provides little in the way of privacy protection. According to Privacy World, "The US does not have a holistic, comprehensive federal law generally regulating privacy and the collection, processing, disclosure and security of 'personal information' (typically defined as information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being linked to, a particular individual)."

Privacy was nice while we had it...