A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
Literally what on Earth are you doing to your license plate that tells The Man more about you in a way that realistically matters? You don’t need your Ashley Madison credentials to create a custom plate.
If you’re worried about dragnet surveillance, I guess it’ll help them when they divide the prison camps by baseball team. If you’re worried about automated surveillance like by ALPRs then, uh, pretty sure the model whose literal entire purpose is to create its own features for classification will find abundant other ways to uniquely fingerprint and extract actual, pertinent information about you. And if you’re worried about targeted surveillance by humans scrutinizing you down to what your custom plate says about you, then god help you, and viva México.
So, you walk into a government agency, and they say, “Thanks for providing this required information about yourself. You can provide more information about yourself to us and everyone you pass while driving your vehicle, for a fee. Remember, the more mainstream your opinion, the more it will cost.” Why would anyone say yes to that proposal? And why would you get up in arms about someone saying they think that’s ridiculous but generally pretty harmless?
If you think the magnitude of information gained is even worth considering for either (or frankly any) party, you’re grossly misunderstanding the scale of the surveillance state or just have really terrible ideas for custom plates. Your plate is inherently already a 100% unique identifier; if you’re worried enough that like six characters of custom text or a chosen design will in any way further government or corporate surveillance, then – and I say this as someone who frequents privacy communities, hates defeatism, and thinks people (myself included) need better privacy hygiene – have fun pissing on a forest fire.
You say you’re into privacy communities, but you sound like someone who pays to get more ads. As for reading comprehension, what exactly does pretty harmless mean to you?
My first thought when reading your previous reply is that you’re someone who likes to argue for the sake of arguing. This reply has reinforced that opinion.
Bbbbbbbbbbb wrote: “I like plate customization, its a form of self expression.”
GreenBeard responded to this totally innocuous, non-argumentative statement with: “That’s like embellishing a prison camp number with a fun design. That’s not self-expression that’s morbid.” Then went on to call the practice “gross” and “tacky” and the people who get custom plates under a “sad illusion” and “letting themselves be tricked”.
Again, in response to just an extremely benign and normal statement: “I like plate customization, its a form of self expression.”
Truly I’m the one who likes arguing for the sake of an argument here – not the person who started and perpetuated this abject, comically combative nonsense.
I agree with you, bc that was also the Impression I got. A very emotional/aggressive and unnecessary response/thread from tt27…