Cars, Cameras, and Computers: License Plates for the 21st Century

Soon after we moved from Texas to Massachusetts in 1983, I went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles (which we always referred to thereafter as the Registry of Woes, but that's another story) and got Massachusetts license plates.  Ours had some fairly typical arrangement of letters and numbers (e. g. HGQ 796), but as we spent more time there, I began to notice that a few cars had plates with only three digits, or maybe two:  "967" or "76."  It took some asking around to discover what was so special about those plates, but eventually I found out.

Turns out that those two- and three-digit plates were handed down from generation to generation, possibly even bequeathed in wills.  You see, Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to issue license plates, in 1903, and the first plates did have only two or three digits.  Somewhere along the line, the bluebloods who owned the first cars with license plates decided that some visible trace of this distinction should be left to their descendants.  So they evidently spoke with their buddies in the legislature to allow these old plate numbers to be passed to younger relatives.  So eighty years later, any latecomers to Massachusetts (and never mind if you moved there as a three-month-old, that makes you a latecomer) could look around and tell which drivers were descended from families old enough, and presumably rich enough, to have owned one of the first cars in the Commonwealth. 

I don't know if this curious habit continues there today, but if it does, it looks like Massachusetts may have to figure out a way to tell computers about the achievements of remote ancestors as well as people.  There is a good chance that everyone's license plate in the near future will have not only visible characters, readable easily by humans and with some difficulty by machines, but will also bear an invisible barcode that is much easier to read by machine than the visible characters are. 

Most people know that computers can read license-plate numbers by now almost as well as people can.  These devices, known as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR for short) use a digital camera and a series of algorithms to separate the alphanumeric characters from the background, which task is increasingly challenging these days when custom plates have pictures of everything from blue whales to your favorite grandchild.  Once that's done, the algorithms interpret the characters and send the result to law-enforcement officials or whoever is interested.  These ALPR devices are used in automated tollbooths on toll roads, as well as their more controversial use in camera-equipped traffic signals that generate tickets for people who run red lights. 

But ALPR does not read the plates correctly 100% of the time, and so 3M and other firms have developed a type of infrared-readable ink that can be used to print a certain form of bar code directly over the visible image on the plate.  3M claims that the invisible barcode is much more reliably read by automatic bar-code readers than the visible characters, and at least one state (Virginia) is seriously considering adopting the machine-readable barcodes.  I have heard a rumor (which was the inspiration of this blog, incidentally) that many if not most states already use them, but I have not been able to confirm this rumor.  It may be the sort of thing that some states would prefer not to be known, anyway. 

We Americans are very attached to our cars, partly because the automobile is perhaps the single most significant technology that enables millions to live more independent lives in many senses.  The mobility permitted by the automobile has altered much of the country's built environment and contributes to the sense of freedom symbolized in movies when a solitary car speeds away from the camera down a lonely desert road. 

Anything that compromises the privacy of the very private space represented by the automobile tends to get our attention.  Many new cars now carry in their onboard computers a system that amounts to a "black box" which records data on control settings, acceleration, and other information that is of interest to insurance companies and lawyers in the event of an accident involving the vehicle.  And now that many cars come with GPS and wireless transceivers, not to mention the cellphones people carry, it is no long stretch of the imagination to picture a Big-Brother government knowing exactly which checkpoints you passed when, any time it wants.  The technology is already largely in place.

But in a way, the invisible-ink barcode idea is only applying to automobiles what we have already applied to our persons.  We are long since used to carrying forms of personal identification that are designed to be read by both humans and machines.  The magnetic strips on your credit cards, the RFID chips in your driver license (that's the way Texas refers to it, not as a "driver's license") and possibly a company or university ID card, and the cellphone in your pocket that is kept track of by your phone company are earlier steps in this direction.  There has been a lot of speculation (including an article that I contributed to in a professional magazine) that sooner or later, having some sort of RFID chip permanently implanted in your body will either become popular as a voluntary form of self-imposed cyborgism, or will be required by the state at some point.

Compared to having an RFID chip implanted on your person, letting your state's motor vehicle office put invisible ink on your license plate is not that big a deal.  From a technical point of view, it's just an incremental improvement that will simplify and improve the accuracy of machines that read license plates.  But the very fact that someone thought it interesting enough to spread a rumor about it says that invisible ink on license plates may cross another invisible line on the way to a future that not all of us would like to see happen.

Sources:  In 2012, the Commonwealth of Virginia (that's how some former colonies refer to themselves) commissioned a study of license plates that mentions the invisible-ink-barcode technology, and is downloadable at http://leg2.state.va.us/dls/h&sdocs.nsf/fc86c2b17a1cf388852570f9006f1299/db715763b38b14da85257ad200653d0d/$FILE/RD383.pdf.

The 3M firm has a news item on a "license-plate shootout" field test of various ID technologies, including their own, at one of the longest URLs I've ever seen:

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/NA_Motor_Vehicle_Services_Systems/Motor_Vehicle_Industry_Solutions/3m-motor-vehicle-services-systems-resources/newsletter-signup-3m-motor-vehicle-services-systems/newsletter-archive-3m-motor-vehicle-services-systems/?PC_7_U00M8B1A00PAD0A0C2MU390ED1000000_assetId=1361625382051.  And I also referred to the Wikipedia article on "vehicle registration plates."  The magazine article I contributed to appeared in Proceedings of the IEEE, "Social implications of technology:  the past, the present, and the future," vol. 100, pp. 1752-1781, May 2012.

Sociometric Badges: Big Advance or Big Brother?

The custom, or really requirement, of wearing an identification badge at work is part of the accepted routine for millions of workers worldwide.  But recently, psychology researchers have teamed up with engineers to develop something called a “sociometric badge.”  As reported in the December 2012 issue of IEEE Spectrum, the developers claim to be able to measure all sorts of remarkable things with these badges, ranging from the truth about how an organization really functions (as opposed to what the organization chart says) all the way up to worker happiness.  Well, maybe not happiness in the broad philosophical sense, but one particular work-related aspect of it called “flow”:  that state of mind sought by high achievers everywhere in which you are fully engaged in what you’re doing, and worries about the rest of the world seem to fall away. 

How do these badges work?  The Hitachi Business Microscope was one of the first ones to be developed, and it’s quite impressive.  Each employee to be studied is issued an card-shaped sensor on a lanyard to be worn around the neck.  Inside the card are a variety of sensors:  accelerometers to measure relative movement, infrared transmitters and receivers to detect when the card is near other cards, a microphone to pick up conversations, a wireless interface, and a flash memory, along with a lithium battery to run the thing.  During the day, it senses movements, conversations, and proximity to others, and logs all these things in a format that is downloaded at night to a central data-gathering location where, after a suitable amount of data has accumulated, researchers can consolidate the information in various ways.

In early experiments, users were also asked to keep their own diaries of daily activities.  Using the sociometric-badge data, the researchers identified certain times in which they said the users were experiencing “flow” or a similar pleasant immersion in productive tasks.  The correlation to what the subjects were actually doing, as recorded in their own personal diaries, was quite good.  In another study, two organizations that were thrown together by a corporate merger were examined to see how well the merger was going.  Network diagrams based on the sociometric data retrieved by the sensors showed that a month after the merger, the supposedly unified organization was still functioning like two independent outfits:  hardly anyone from Organization A was interacting with Organization B and vice-versa.  When the managers were shown this problem, they “took steps” (unspecified in the article) to fix it, and the success of their actions was also reflected in later data.

It’s understandable that working for a private company involves the giving up of certain rights and privileges that one would be reluctant to cede to the government, for example.  Companies have a right to snoop into one’s email or phone conversations that use company-owned facilities.  But it seems that a new line has been crossed with the sociometric badge.

For example, if anyone tried to do such an experiment at a university, the researchers would first have to get approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board, which is charged with the task of protecting the rights of human subjects in experiments.  If the researchers in the corporate world are publishing papers on their work, which they appear to be doing, they are performing research on human subjects, but nothing in the article says anything about permission being asked or granted for the experiments.  Presumably, wearing the badge was a condition of employment.

Why would anyone have qualms about wearing a sociometric badge?  Well, put it in old-fashioned terms, and imagine it was being done before the electronics was available to do this sort of thing unobtrusively. What if you got to work one day and found a private detective taking pictures of you every minute and writing down everything you said and the names of everyone you spoke with all day?  Most people would be creeped out by such intrusiveness, yet that is only a little more extreme than the kind of data the sociometric badge collects.  It may not be possible to reconstruct entire conversations or your exact location at all times from the badge data, but determined persons with ulterior motives could extract something close to that level of detail if they tried.

So far, no journalist to my knowledge has requested any sociometric-badge data under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  But if this research is as effective as its proponents claim, sooner or later it will make its way into the public-service sector, where FOIA requests must be honored.  A rather cynical old professor I knew once told me that you should never write anything down that you would not want to show up on the front page of the New York Times.  If sociometric-badge data is ever subject to an FOIA request, public officials could have their every move for a given day show up in the newspapers, or whatever will pass for newspapers in the future.  This may be a disquieting prospect for some.

The branch of psychology used in this research is called “positive psychology,” meaning it studies the more appealing aspects of our psyches:  happiness, success, productivity, and so on, rather than the grimmer sides of our nature observed by abnormal psychology.  While that is all very well, even the definition of happiness itself is still a matter of dispute in philosophy, so the fact that some researchers are only trying to make people happier should not give them blanket permission to do anything they want.  Issues of privacy and freedom of association at least need to be addressed before the sociometric badge becomes more popular in both the corporate and the public sectors.  So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Sources:  “Sensing Happiness” by K. Yano, S. Lyubomirsky, and J. Chancellor, appeared in IEEE Spectrum for December 2012 on pp. 32-37.