this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Privacy
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And there are plenty of hidden cameras as well. I know for a fact that many of the portable signs that display your speed and flash a warning if you're over the limit are ALSO able to read license plates and immediately alert the police. They were using it to look for stolen vehicles when I became aware of the system, but that was 7 years ago and all it takes is a little tweak to suddenly have a record of every car passing by.
I used to work for a company that would put temporary cameras out to record particular intersections or stretches of road. It was all temporary traffic safety studies, not an active search or dragnet surveillance, so my conscience was mostly clean. It was still wild to see how much technology can be quickly put out to record and track drivers.
On top of cameras we had Bluetooth sniffers that would get put up on every leg of a 4way intersection and just collect Bluetooth hardware addresses. It doesn't identify you, but it is able to tell which direction you took at that 4 way because your Bluetooth address only showed up on two of the boxes.
One of the more surprising methods for hiding cameras were those big orange traffic barrels. When they stack on top of each other, there's a 6-8in gap between the tops where you can stash stuff. If you ever see two of those barrels stacked on each other, look for a little window cut out near the top of the top one. There might be a camera sitting on top of the bottom barrel and hidden by the top barrel. They'd point it to capture back license plates, so you don't see it when driving towards it.
This would be illegal in EU now, at least if the BT addresses or car plates were logged.
where I live those run off of a little solar panel. if we're talking about the same thing, I doubt that it has ALPR function
Got a source on those speed signs also having ALPRs?
Yes. I worked for a city and was tasked with occasionally reading emails that had been reported. I got to read some interesting ones, but the one I'm talking about: The auto-theft detective was informing patrol officers about the setting up of the device I described. It would send an email when a vehicle's license plate was scanned and was returned with a STOLEN result. The majority of the email was about how the officers should not mention the device and only say that they had received a tip about a stolen vehicle.
We aren't talking about the permanent sorts of signs, like those described by @[email protected]