From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americansā€™ political leanings and more.

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The readers are smart enough to distinguish between them, so it wonā€™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.

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2 points

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.

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The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If itā€™s able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume itā€™s able to trim excess characters.

However, Iā€™m not telling you what to do at all. I donā€™t know how they operate; Iā€™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.

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1 point

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 arenā€™t sure what is or isnā€™t a license plate). These kinds of databases are so massive thereā€™s little to no human eyes on images. Anyway I donā€™t think it would be very hard to send garbage into their database.

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3 points

The readers are just cameras with a sim card and use a simple motion sensor to trigger the camera. All of the processing is server side.

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I donā€™t disagree. The reader to which I was referring, is the entire system, to include the server-side processing. If itā€™s able to create a searchable db of political standings, we should assume itā€™s able to trim excess characters.

However, Iā€™m not telling you what to do at all. I donā€™t know how they operate; Iā€™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.

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1 point

I once saw a teardown of one of the flock safety fixed position cameras, but Iā€™ll be damned as I canā€™t find it anymore.

Itā€™s a very simple system, much like a trail camera. It has a motion sensor, a camera, a sim card, a gps module, a battery, and a solar panel.

They simply stick the pole in the ground along a right of way and the camera knows where itā€™s at because of the gps, it doesnā€™t need any kind of wires installed. The camera isnā€™t super high resolution, it just has a narrow lens on it so that it can capture text. These things are made with inexpensive off the shelf parts. I canā€™t speak for the Motorola systems, but I image they have some object recognition built in because they are mounted to a vehicle. I believe those are a much older design, but I have seen parts for sale on ebay, so they have probably updated it in the past few years to make it cheaper to produce.

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