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> What is the current legal thinking on the right to privacy while driving

I think it’s pretty clear from precedent you have none.

Every vehicle displays a unique number in large, readable type, and has for longer than any person has been alive. I haven’t seen any objections.

The same applies to driving licenses that are covered in very personal information which is handed over willy-nilly to anyone who asks for it.

In California they make it clear that driving is a “privilege”, not something in which you have any rights.

Edit: another example: notice that the automatic toll collection systems are always implemented as registration+billing based systems rather than as any kind of privacy-protecting cash-like schemes.

I mostly agree on precedent, as far as I know, but I would say that recent developments like the GDPR and others targeting digital practices are probably starting to broach this topic of what is public and what is private. And I’m asking because I don’t know whether precedent is changing right now; I imagine that it is changing in some locales. Googling just now I noticed that California passed a new privacy act in 2020. I’ve seen a lot of discussion and debate, and the idea that cheap mass surveillance technology is a marked departure from what was available before this century does legitimately question whether we can continue operating under the framework where anything done in public is free for someone else to record and consume. That idea is now much, much more prone to abuse than it was 30 years ago, right?

> Every vehicle displays a unique number in large, readable type, and has for longer than any person has been alive. I haven’t seen any objections.

Because the bar to getting that data used to be quite high and limited in scope. Now with license plate reader software in conjunction with street light cameras, the dynamic has completely shifted to easily record and store a detailed tracking log for all observed license plate numbers in a city.

Big power dynamic changes like that result in fundamental shifts like “right to be forgotten”, the GDPR, etc.

The only thing that has prevented an uproar so far is that you can’t go type in your neighbor’s license plate into a website and get that detailed tracking log at the drop of a hat. Similar thing for cell phone location records from cell companies.

I think problem here is one of trying to limit the "pre-crime" instead of the crime itself. We have a problem with companies using mass data surveillance to keep track of the movements, generally of large amounts of people. Trying to stop this by creating laws that prevent taking pictures is almost doomed to fail.

Along the same lines, if an office follows someone (they believe might be related to a crime, etc) around town to track their whereabouts, that seems within reason. If the police force (using advances in technology) tracks the whereabouts of all people at all times, it's unreasonable. It's the same thing, just at a different scale.

We need to find an effective way to allow the "components" of something that isn't allowed, without allowing the thing itself.

This is just my anecdata, but over 30 years of driving, it's only the last 2-3 that have felt like a large percentage of driver no longer care about traffic rules.

It used to be it was rare for me to see a major violation. Now it's is literally every single time I go for a drive or ride my bike, at least in the city of San Francisco, that see (a) someone running a red light, (b) someone turning right from the 3rd lane (meaning they should be in the first lane), (c) someone turning left illegally before the on-coming traffic when the light turns green, (d) driving for blocks in the bus only lanes, I even saw someone drive down the wrong way down a one way street to take a short cut. Often I see 2 to 3 of these during a single outing.

If more surveillance would stop this then I'm for it.

I'm curious what changed (a) my noticing ... I really don't think that's it but it's possible (b) people for some reason no longer giving a fuck (c) too many video games (half joking, half not, personally love video games but of course in a video game you drive however you want. Of course you also kill people in video games (d) cycling culture bleeding into driving culture. (e) ....

> photograph anything visible from public land

From public land I can see people sunbathing in their gardens.

For a photographer, there may exist an excuse such as "yes but the landscape in the background"...

For data such as the routes of a car¹, there is no excuse.

(¹Which does not overlap with "what enters or leaves a territory" - monitored in many administrations.)

Would you mind elaborating? I don’t know what you mean by ‘excuse’ in either example. You don’t need an excuse as a photographer to capture people sunbathing in their gardens, if you’re standing on public land. And law enforcement doesn’t currently need an excuse for tracking location. In both cases, the real issue is that there is currently (as far as the law is concerned) no “reasonable expectation of privacy” when you’re outside and visible to others.

when when in alaska, and the distance is such that technical or mechanical means are required to observe nude sunbathers, there is no public visibility, the offense is with the fault of the eavesdropper, and it is voyeurism.

Totally, there is a line you can cross, and it might require a telescope or mirrors. There absolutely is an expectation of privacy on private property when there is no public visibility. I wasn’t talking about telescopes or mirrors X-rays or any other tricks, just what you can observe with the naked eye. There probably is a gray area here with zoom lenses that would have to be decided in court, it might come down to intent and not who’s fault it is.

I guess that discussion is veering away from the practical question of whether anyone should be able to know who you are if you’re driving on public roads. It doesn’t require any special technical or mechanical means to see people’s license plates and faces from the side of the road or from poles or overpasses, right? What I’m really curious about is whether there should be laws established against such surveillance because it has become too cheap and easy to monitor everyone at once all the time, or whether as a society we deem activity in public space to be public knowledge and not a matter of privacy, whether no privacy should be expected.

popular culture plays into it alot.

there are somethings that are illegal that the public, and enforcement simply ignore most of the time. there are other things that are legal but apalling to the public when they encounter them.

i think this distills to a threshold for surveillance. there needs to be some discriminator between casual observation, and active surviellance.

there seems to be a need to revisit just what a warrant is, and why it is required. i really would like to see a warrant apply to any means of collection, as in the warrant is allowing posession of the data itself, regardless of the origin as a court appointed priviledge for the term of the investigation, -regardless of origin

I have no idea what current legal thought is, but I would hope that it factors in how data is collected. There is a world of difference between observing someone in a public space and using a device attached to private property to collect data. Likewise, there is a difference between passive observations and what is effectively stalking someone.

As for photographer's rights, I work in a public space. I don't care whether people photograph me unless it crosses the line of harassment. Likewise, if I notice someone taking photographs of other people's children, I will do my best to make them feel uncomfortable with their actions. Context is always important.

The idea of what is public and private data is also constantly changing. I recall governments making public data available online in the mid to late 1990's. Records that you could visit government offices for in prior decades (e.g. certain types of property records) were viewed in a very different light once they became easily accessible. These changes will continue to handle, in part to balance rights but also because we need to address an imbalance of power due to an imbalance in access to information.

> The pamphlet patiently explains that you’re allowed to photograph anything visible from public land.

this might be true in the USA but it is definitely not true in Japan. People's right to privacy trumps your right to take pictures in public. In crowds it's usually not a problem but make a particular person the subject of your photo and you could easily get in trouble. Same for buildings if you publish the photo

> The pamphlet patiently explains that you’re allowed to photograph anything visible from public land.

Or public air space, for that matter.

There are tech companies that have cameras that track all the vehicles that drive by their campus HQs -- and report the activity back to the city/police

Seems a rather large claim to make with no further elaboration.

Our HOA uses flock safety cameras with car plate readers that are connected to the local police station. I have zero doubt that large tech companies do the same

I am not going to elaborate due to the fact that I gave details of such on HN about [Fucking Bullshit] company that was doing this sent their lawyers after me, and I had to ask HN to delete the comment...

this problem is simple to solve, remove license plates. They're pointless anyway.

What do you mean? To the DOT, license plates ensure drivers have had basic training and that the vehicle has been inspected for basic safety and emissions standards. To police, the license plates offer a way to find out who the driver is. You might not see direct benefits today, but there certainly is a point to plates. If you find yourself in an accident that is the other party’s fault, you might understand the benefits to you of their license plate being visible. I hope that doesn’t happen to you, but many people in the past have been glad the offender could be identified.

The side effects cannot be worse than the medicine. License plates and modern data collection practices are far worse than any of the purported benefits.

I’m still not following, could you elaborate on the problems with license plates? What are the negative side effects, and how/why is that “far worse” than meeting safety & emission standards and catching at-fault drivers after accidents?

One thing to consider is what would happen if license plates actually did go away. This idea is completely unrealistic- license IDs & license plates (or some way for police to identify you) are never going away. But assuming they did, what would happen? This would mean an astronomical increase in hit and run accidents, in uninsured driving, and in criminal activity from unsafe driving to theft. Do you think that wouldn’t happen, and if so why? Why would having no plates be a better thing than having them?

How about this: e-ink plates plus public-key cryptography.

Your actual license number or other identifier, plus a time-based nonce, is encrypted with the DOL's public key. The displayed value changes as the nonce changes according to its schedule, so third-party observers can't correlate the displayed value across time.

If you get in a hit-and-run and note the displayed plate, the DOL has the other half of the keypair, the time, and the derivation function for the nonce, so can translate the displayed value to the actual owner.

Not being able to publish a single stable value in amber alert cases would be a bit of a regression, but you could still publish what a value would be at a particular time interval.

Doesn't do anything about governmental abuses of ALPR data but could be effective at cutting out corporate abuses. I'm probably missing something but it doesn't seem to increase info leakage w.r.t the status quo either - you'd theoretically be able to figure out when a particular image of a plate was taken, but that source would almost definitely be timestamped anyway.

e: I don't think "just ban private ALPR" is a solution; it's simply way too easy to do with COTS+FOSS and way too hard to enforce against.

> I don't think "just ban private ALPR" is a solution; it's simply way too easy to do with COTS+FOSS and way too hard to enforce against.

Which leads to another issue, that local governments have contracted these corporations to do just this. From red light cameras to suvellience cams, police don't actually store this data themselves, private companies do the bulk of the work here.

And even if we could do something about ALPRs, the same outsourcing of the 4th is going on in areas like mobile telemetry.

It makes sense as a technical solution to the problem of not being tracked / identified by NGOs. Could work but seems a little complicated, and unlikely to end there; car, location & face recognition could achieve the same ends, by and large. (China already does this). However the bigger issue to resolve is the goals and legality. We haven’t yet established that being able to identify someone in public is bad, or conversely that being able to travel anonymously is a goal we want, right?

> car, location & face recognition could achieve the same ends, by and large. (China already does this).

Yeah, I actually started out writing that comment about how license plates are probably unnecessary given the volume of other forms of location data accessible to LE but the peak HN strat was more fun to think about.

> We haven’t yet established that being able to identify someone in public is bad, or conversely that being able to travel anonymously is a goal we want, right?

I don't have full answers here, but I think it's worth considering the modes of enforcement enabled by this change. Despite there being no de jure change in privacy protections while in public, there's been a de facto change from that kind of data only being accessible in cases of specific, targeted investigations to that kind of data being accessible to automated dragnet enforcement. Targeted investigations are inherently limited in scale and there's (at least theoretically) a nexus between the investigation and some kind of probable cause, but dragnet enforcement generally disregards fourth-amendment protections. The Carpenter decision theoretically offers some protection against this, but parallel construction is trivial enough that I'm not exactly resting easy.

So, I think it is possible to be against ALPRs without necessarily being for wholly anonymous travel in public - it's an issue of probable cause and avoiding the fruit of the poisoned tree, not one of absolute lawlessness. My (admittedly silly) suggestion is also problematic because it doesn't address this concern at all. My real feelings are a lot closer to 'calvinmorrison, but I acknowledge that "just get rid of license plates" isn't exactly a winning proposition to the average voter.

Lol! This comment is peak HN.

How about this: e-ink plates plus public-key cryptography.

You’re suggesting that a solid plate of metal that can sit, neglected, out in the weather for multiple years without much visual wear, and when damaged by the car wash can just be bent back to shape, and replace that with your delicate little piece of electronics and software? And pile on some PKI to boot?

I’m seriously on the fence in deciding if this comment is trolling me, or if this is what late-stage HN looks like. :-)

It was definitely at least partially tongue-in-cheek ^_^

I bet you could figure out the physical aspects. E-ink tech itself has come a long way in the last few years following some patent expirations, and the electronics stuff is basically just a yubikey JB welded to a license plate frame. The cost per unit would be pretty low at scale, so just replacing borked units seems pretty doable.

Imo, a bigger problem is competent implementation. Yeah sure, the DOL is gonna run a bunch of PKI infrastructure and not mess that up. At least in my region, just keeping a largely static website up seems to be a struggle.

The problem is that our government cannot be trusted. The car-ification of the united states in combination with endless driving regulations creates a dragnet for the police to simply stop and detain anyone going about their daily lives.

There's no reason license plates expire, there's no reason we should have to pay for inspection, there's little proof it even is effective in improving safety.

Drivers licenses again prove very little. People are pulled over constantly for suspended and expired licenses, were the unable to drive? clearly they were.

The issue with license plates is that it creates a automatic background check on every person who drives past a police officers with an ALPR. It's about as bad as the slave catching squads from the ante-bellum era. There's no reason I should have a bench warrant from missing a traffic ticket in New Jersey cause a police officer to detain me, arrest me, jail me, and send me back to New Jersey.

The problem is, you cannot separate the benefits from the bad. The problem is the government routinely abuses their power of licensure (see may-issue licenses in new york) to the point they cannot be trusted to license at all.

Given the rampant abuses on our civil rights from the government, especially state and local governments who tend to do the day to day brunt of enforcement, I hesitate to offer them any option to be more efficient.

These things are all decided by individual states. Permanent license plates and zero inspections are definitely a thing in some parts of the country. Drivers licenses with very long validity periods were too, until REAL ID became essentially required.

Ah, libertarianism coupled with if you cannot solve every case then you shouldn't solve any case.

I can separate the benefits from the bad. The road without rules is a net loss for everyone. Companies and individuals would gladly save on getting inspections if it saved them a few dollars at risk to everyone on the road when their bald tires and bad brakes finally failed them.

> The problem is that our government cannot be trusted.

Depends on what you mean, it sounds like you’re saying the government cannot be trusted to be perfect. I’d agree with that. But the counter problem is that the public cannot be trusted either. A huge number of people can and will avoid maintaining their car if they don’t have to, will wait to purchase tires until after they’re bald, will drive with smoky exhaust, will avoid paying sales taxes if they aren’t caught, will crash their cars and run if they can’t be tracked down, etc. etc.

This isn’t really a government problem, it’s a people problem. People just happen to make up the government.

> There’s no reason license plates expire, there’s no reason we should have to pay for inspection, there’s little proof it even is effective in improving safety.

Kind of a lot to unpack there. Contrary to your claim, there are reasons plates & registration & IDs expire. Whether you accept and agree with those reasons is a separate question. Cars do change hands and degrade over time. It makes sense to check in, especially from the POV of the govt who maybe primarily wants to tax any sales, and keep track of who’s associated with each license plate.

Safety and emissions inspections are improving our safety & air, and there’s data over time to show it.

> Drivers licenses again prove very little.

There’s some proof; we have lower accident rates than some other countries where drivers have a lower barrier to entry. Aside from that, licenses are partly for identification. You might not like that, but that is part of their purpose.

> It’s about as bad as the slave catching squads from the ante-bellum era.

Hard disagree. Treading dangerous water with this one.

> There’s no reason I should have a bench warrant from missing a traffic ticket in New Jersey cause a police officer to detain me, arrest me, jail me, and send me back to New Jersey.

Sure there is, you appear to be fleeing when you miss a court date and drive across state lines. I’m skeptical this happens with any regularity over minor traffic tickets with no other context and a clean record. But again you’re saying “no reason” when what you mean is you don’t like it.

> Given the rampant abuses

You’ve established that you have a fear of abuse, but not that it’s affecting you routinely. I haven’t seen any dragnets ever, personally.

> Safety and emissions inspections are improving our safety & air, and there’s data over time to show it.

I'm curious about this. Most US states do not require regular safety inspections, and some of those that do, only require them for a subset of vehicles (only commercial vehicles, only vehicles over a certain age, etc.). Around half of states require emissions testing, though often it's not yearly, and there are often exceptions for newer cars.

Certainly there are political and cost-related drivers to not requiring this sort of testing. But I do wonder what studies have been done, specifically for safety inspections: do they significantly reduce incidence of vehicle crashes, or at least of fatalities or serious injuries when crashes do happen?

Yes it's been done. I think one case I read said it had a 2% reduction, I think one other said none at all. This is one from a quick google.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1060816

I guarantee you 95% of America doesn't agree with you on this.

License plates make speed cams possible.

Now I will agree that they can be an instrument for evil, but sometimes they are the only way to avoid a lot of deaths.

License plates signify an owners initial registration. That’s it.

> license plates ensure drivers have had basic training

No, that’s what a drivers license does.

> and that the vehicle has been inspected for basic safety and emissions standards.

Most states (even ones that do require those inspections) issue license plates without these.

> To police, the license plates offer a way to find out who the driver is.

They really don’t, because vehicles are frequently driven by people who did not register them.

Both you and the parent are making broad assumptions based on narrow experience.

I've lived in enough states that various parts of my experience from various jurisdictions both confirm and refute each of the points made.

It's important for everyone to remember that their experience is not the only experience.

Since you implicate me, I’m open to feedback and willing to change my mind. Would you point out my incorrect assumptions to me?

Portuguese license plates for a long time had the month/year of the car manufacture. This been discontinued because apparently no other country in EU does this and it was confused with expiry date.

There is no other indication on the license plate. just the numbers and letters.

I assume that expiry dates on US plates is related to either road tax or vehicle inspection

> I assume that expiry dates on US plates is related to either road tax or vehicle inspection

Usually yearly registration, though some US states do gate the registration completion on some forms of inspection.

California, for example, requires emissions testing every other year for cars older than a certain age, and won't send the new registration until that's been completed. But most states don't require any kind of regular safety or general road-worthiness inspections. I think that's kinda bonkers, but I haven't really looked at stats around how many car crashes are caused by a failure to maintain a car or its safety features. It's possible that the cost of doing such testing is often deemed too high, when considering the benefit.

I’m not making any assumptions.

In all 50 states, plates represent the registered owner and not the driver, because non-owners can drive cars in all 50 states.

As for safety and emissions, only a minority of states do each of these, and the majority of those denote compliance with a sticker, or have exemptions:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Un...

> They really don’t, because vehicles are frequently driven by people who did not register them.

Someone else driving your car doesn’t prevent the police from compelling you to tell them who drove your car. The point is the police can come to you. Different story if the car’s stolen, of course, but license plates in fact are used often as the first point of contact to identify drivers, regardless of whether it is their car. Without the plate, there might be nothing to go on, right?

Your other corrections are valid, I was imprecise with my point. Do you agree with parent that plates are pointless? I was only trying to point out the utility and reasons for the existing system of licensing and registration, plates, IDs, and stickers. I can see parent is making more of a political statement than one of actual utility, but maybe also important to keep in mind that purpose and utility of the various parts of this scheme look different depending on who you are.

No I think plates are important, for the purpose of correlating a vehicle back to the registered owner.

And this can be used, in turn, to look up a lot of the other data you pointed out, even if it does not do so directly.

> Without the plate, there might be nothing to go on, right?

There’s the VIN, but they’re difficult to see at a distance, and don’t indicate the jurisdiction of registration for out of state vehicles, and so, they’d be a PITA for most things states care about using plates for.

Difficult to see at a distance is a little charitable - all cars I've encountered the vin is in the engine bay.

Without a license plate, all you have to go on is make / model / colour and any obvious modifications, essentially the same as seeing a random human but with less cardinality since vehicles are mass produced

The VIN number in modern cars is located in multiple places. Usually: engine mount, central tunnel, under the windscreen, often in the trunk.

They’re normally externally visible at the lower corner of your windshield. Authorities often do use these numbers when verifying the identity of parked cars or if they suspect an issue with the plate.

Years ago I put my cars in business name and the mail goes to a post office box. Simple and cheap privacy, yet most people can't be bothered to do it.

Whenever I get one of the geotracking cars, hopefully the antenna wire will develop a fault.

> Simple and cheap privacy, yet most people can't be bothered to do it.

Most people don’t have businesses registered.

Doesn't the business registration require a real (non PO box) address? If so, then that seems pretty easy to trace, no?

> ensure [...] that the vehicle has been inspected for basic safety and emissions standards

There is a Youtube channel where someone got a Hummer, ripped off the engine, and transformed it into an electric vehicle. When he went for registration (as a custom car) nobody even asked to see it.