For decades, cameras have been installed on American roads to snap pics of speeding (or not-speeding) vehicles so that fines can be mailed to the guilty (or innocent) motorists.
These cameras are supposedly about ticketing for speeding. But they have also often been used as a means of revenue extraction.
Now there’s a new angle.
Super-smart, super-dumb artificial intelligence is being merged with street cameras.
The main company behind them is Flock Safety. Its cameras record license plates and also a vehicle’s make, model, and color, but, says Flock, nothing about individuals. When the AI can relate the plate number to a criminal suspect, law enforcers get a hit when searching for the number.
Then officers act on this information, often without any double-checking, to stop cars and force drivers out of their cars. Sometimes at gunpoint.
Even aside from the issues of privacy invasion raised by the sweeping surveillance, there’s the fact that the automated license plate recognition (ALPR) makes mistakes. Supplemented by officers’ mistakes. Innocent drivers and other occupants may be terrorized, arrested, even jailed before the mistake is realized.
Flock says that its cameras accurately capture 93 percent of license plates. As the Institute for Justice points out, even this “low” error rate means “well over a billion inaccurate readings per month” when Flock is scanning over 20 billion license plates per month.
Many locales that try Flock cameras end up pulling them down. None should ever begin to use them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
2 replies on “Billions Mis-Served”
We have repeatedly seen that state employees often actively refuse to cross-check the results of automated systems. And, from a purely amoral perspective, they have little reason to do so. Cross-checking increases their work-loads, and qualified immunity indemnifies them against the costs of error.
Meanwhile, the government has repeatedly violated its promises not to misuse the information that it collects. No one at the Bureau of the Census was ever punished for their betrayal of Japanese-Americans; no one at the DHS has been or ever will be punished for warrantless spying on the use of telephones by American citizens.
And I promise you that the PRC has hacked-into Flock’s system.
You should point out that many states issue multiple plates with nearly identical license numbers. For example, New Jersey might have a 100 plates reading “34 xx DME” where xx is small numbers 00 to 99. Flock will read the large numbers but not the small ones.
New Hampshire allows punctuation so different plates could read PAUL, PAUL-, -PAUL, and PAUL•. Other states don’t use punctuation so Flock in those states would read all of these plates the same.