Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency

micromacrofoot

The US spends billions and billions of dollars trying to police problems instead of spending the same money on addressing the root cause... collectively there's enough money to make this country an absolute paradise, but we're all acting like crabs in a bucket. It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.

stego-tech

Yeeeeeah , no school district needs or should have access to LPR databases. Period. Full stop. Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law. Fuck mass surveillance.

rhoopr

A surveillance tech company asserting that they know better, based on 'big data'. Shocking. The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.

einpoklum

I'm getting strong "California uber alles" [1] vibes, even though it's Chicago.

cmiles8

School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there. It’s a big source of fraud that hurts those paying taxes in the districts. I’m all for strong enforcement of those rules, but this goes too far. In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.

outside1234

Can't wait to hear it is biased for flagging brown people

pavel_lishin

I think this is an entirely cromulent reason to forbid the car to attend the school. But perhaps not a child, who presumably doesn't live in the car.

0xbadcafebee

I got a bill recently from NYC for speeding through a red light, which was weird enough as it wasn't a car that I own. But the license plate listed is one I had years ago, when I lived in a different state. Clearly license plate databases even within government are inaccurate. I can't imagine how bad the private databases are. The fact that the government also leans on the private databases seems to compound the problem.

hypeatei

What kind of demented people are running that school district? Who comes up with the idea to use LPR data and gets other administrators to sign off on it? It just seems riddled with edge cases that no one in that district would be qualified to deal with or foresee.

dec0dedab0de

I'm not necessarily against the school having this data, though it is creepy. But what the heck, her driver's license and proof of home ownership should be good enough. This is really a failing on the school district to apply any logic at all. What if she owned a business in another area and registered the vehicle there? What if the parent lived in one place, but the child was living somewhere else? I ran into a similar problem with my child over a decade ago, his mother had bought a new house that needed work but updated her driver's license too soon. She still had my address on her checks, where she hadn't lived for years, and they randomly used that to launch an investigation. Afterwards they forced my kid to switch school. Which is made even crazier by it being the same district, like the taxes are going to the same spot, and they hadn't even moved in yet. School districts being their own government is a big problem in general. It seems like the whole point of them is to enforce segregation.

graemep

We had a similar problem some years back in the UK. Surveillance powers that were justified as necessary because of terrorism were used to check on whether people lived in the correct area for a school - as well as a lot of other minor offences. The intent was obvious from the start because of the bodies that were given these powers (local authorities that run state schools are not involved in fighting terrorism). There was a backlash and the surveillance powers were trimmed down.

Ccecil

Big flag error I can see right away is joint custody where a parent lives out of the zone. Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged. Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision? What about paid caregivers or family members? This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it. There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.

cromka

School zoning and funding schools from local taxes is one of those things that always perplexed me when I lived in NYC. Ghettos full of "self-fulfilling prophecy" kids continue to exist to this date and people don't see to care much. It's one of those things that warrant a "I am too European for this shit" comment, because even though catchment areas exist here too, and you can't exactly send your kid to any school you wish (although in many EU countries you still can), schools are NOT founded through local taxes. This and private prisons exploiting inmates for cheap workforce are plain, old-school segregation, except diluted and less "in your face". US seriously needs to start fixing some of its shit because it's getting grosser by the day and you can't pretend to be such a developed nation anymore: the King is Naked and rest of the world just doesn't buy the Hollywood illusion anymore.

kittikitti

I dislike how LPR startups are confusing everyone by promoting "ontology" to mislead people that it's simply "surveillance".

OwlsParlay

Interestingly US-based newsrooms are still geo-blocking EU users. Not even bothering to ask for cookies.

blackcatsec

While I'll make no judgment specifically on whether or not she is telling the truth, because the article itself isn't enough validation to say she is telling the truth here; I'll comment more on the comments in this thread. At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally. A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair. So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here). But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end. At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.

pessimizer

When you don't have a functioning government, while technology continues to advance, lobbyists and government come up with spurious reasons why previous absolute rights don't apply to almost identical circumstances when colored with new technologies. I don't even care about this case. Probably 99.9% of the time this particular system comes up with the correct answer - but since it's tracking cars and not people, it screwed up when somebody (extremely unusually) loaned out their car for months to a person who lives where people often fraudulently claim residence in that school district in order to (unfairly) take advantage of their schools. For the 1/1000 that it gets wrong, let them complain and have it cleared up manually; is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate? The problem is illegal searches, Congress has shown that it doesn't care, the Supremes since Scalia left don't care, and the Dem base don't care if it targets the Repub base and the Repub base don't care if it targets the Dem base; both of them have been trained to think that it is alt-left alt-right populism to have privacy rights (or any rights at all.) Expecting the same people who think that the 1st Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have the internet or that the 2nd Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have machine guns to be any sort of meaningful speed bump on this almost complete project of complete public-private tracking of every individual at all times is silly. The Founding Fathers didn't have residency requirements for suburban public school attendance or property tax funding of it. They didn't even have public schools.

hrimfaxi

Sounds like an easy-win lawsuit against both the district and the company.

Aurornis

The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight. > her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.” The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?

rdiddly

OK, it's lawsuit time.