One of the problems with safeguarding privacy in the digital era is the way digital photography has exploded. We’ve covered the problem of license plate readers before, particularly when governments team up with corporations to effectively serve as debt collectors. But the issue goes even farther than the companies building these databases and selling them to law enforcement agencies. Google and Facebook are both contributing.

Simply searching for a license plate number online is often enough to pull up photos of an actual vehicle, as Jalopnik has discovered. This might not seem like much of a finding because one could plausibly expect a records search to show a photo associated with a specific car. What’s significant here is that the search works on images — images that were never tagged with any data related to the license plate number.

Google, in other words, isn’t just picking up that ABCDEF is a license plate because that information is embedded in the same webpage that’s also hosting the image. It’s reading license plate data off vehicles and indexing that information as something you can Google. Searching for a license plate, in fact, is as simple as entering it as a search string.

Jalopnik conducted further testing and confirmed that the issue is widespread. The data isn’t being separately tagged as a license plate — it’s just tagged as numerical data associated with the file. The tagging doesn’t distinguish between foreign and domestic plates. The way to apparently avoid this is to either use a strict numeric plate or to have a personalized plate with a sequence that’s common and therefore likely to get lost in the avalanche of similar data.

Facebook, it seems, does something similar. Jalopnik tested by posting an image of a vehicle with a photo and then searching for the license plate number. The search worked, surfacing the vehicle, despite the fact that the car wasn’t manually tagged with its own license plate number.

Intended Consequences

Years ago, when companies like Google and Facebook announced they would begin auto-tagging photos by identifying the locations and individuals in them, privacy advocates worried that this kind of data could be used to track people. Concerns about the risks of applying this kind of analysis to data were voiced at the time and dismissed by those who had much to gain from implementing the idea. Google co-founder Larry Page has argued in the past for making all medical data public information. Larry Page, needless to say, has never had to worry about being fired or penalized for a private medical condition.

It’s impossible to call this an unintended consequence. It’s an entirely intended consequence that was dismissed as irrelevant by people who never had to worry about the risks of having their personal data visible online. It’s the consequence of applying sophisticated image analysis tools that can identify elements within an image without regard for how that data might be used by bad actors. Today, if your vehicle is photographed, your license plate number can wind up online as a functional search string. Google may not have set out to create a license plate database, and it’s not going to be as effective in that role as a purpose-built application, but it can be used that way.

Is this good? Google and Facebook think it is. I’m much less sure. In allowing these companies to destroy individual privacy, we’ve also made it effectively impossible for anyone to have privacy at all. It doesn’t matter if you refuse to upload pictures of your self/house/vehicle. Other people may well do it for you. Once it’s done, backend tools can strip-mine data out of the image and use it for search purposes.

I don’t think Google is deliberately building a license plate database the way corporate data brokers have. That’s actually the scary part. This isn’t an intended consequence of Google and Facebook’s effort to build a license database. It’s an intended consequence of the way they think about data, period. When you believe that all information ought to be public and refuse to consider all of the reasons why people might want information to be private, outcomes like this are absolutely intentional. But that doesn’t make them good.

Top image credit: ELSAG LPR

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