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.
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