License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars

www.wired.com License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars

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.

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I’m looking for some adversarial material - numbers and letters at various angles that I can stick to the left and right of my license plate. To a human it will be obvious which part is my license plate but it might be sufficient to confuse an ALPR algorithm.
- Literally illegal
  
  to modify the license plate itself. but it's surroundings? why?
  
  What do you think obscuring means?
  
  Obsucuring means making it partially or entirely not visible.
  Obfuscating, however...
  
  the other user defined it well
  
  It varies by state and there are no laws that say it needs to be machine readable. It only needs to be human readable.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- I am curious what just running it over with a yellow highlighter might do at night

83 comments