This Company Built a Private Surveillance Network. We Tracked Someone With It

[GURPS]

I gave the private investigator, who offered to demonstrate the capability, a plate of someone who consented to be tracked.


It was a match.

The results popped up: dozens of sightings, spanning years. The system could see photos of the car parked outside the owner's house; the car in another state as its driver went to visit family; and the car parked in other spots in the owner's city. Each was tagged with the time and GPS coordinates of the car. Some showed the car's location as recently as a few weeks before. In addition to photos of the vehicle itself, the tool displayed the car's accurate location on an easy to understand, Google Maps-style interface.

This tool, called Digital Recognition Network (DRN), is not run by a government, although law enforcement can also access it. Instead, DRN is a private surveillance system crowdsourced by hundreds of repo men who have installed cameras that passively scan, capture, and upload the license plates of every car they drive by to DRN's database. DRN stretches coast to coast and is available to private individuals and companies focused on tracking and locating people or vehicles. The tool is made by a company that is also called Digital Recognition Network.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn

 

[acommondisaster]

Interesting article. I just finished a podcast "live and die in LA" where they tracked the killer using his google location history from his phone (not pinging celltowers, which the podcast explains is not an exact science) and they were able to track him completely. Where he killed her, based on location and time there, where he buried her, each dumpster he threw her belongings away on his hours long drive from home to where he killed her and back. Chilling. The police investigators had never used anything but celltower pings and couldn't come close to what his google mapping history revealed. We are never on our own anymore.

 

[BernieP]

Wonderful, you can be virtually stalked by anyone who pays up.

 

[BOP]

Wonderful, you can be virtually stalked by anyone who pays up.

And not just on SMIBs online by progbots.

 

[BernieP]

And not just on SMIBs online by progbots.

Back in the day it was learned that cops in Philly were doing two things with their ability to get information on a vehicle.
They would use that ability to retaliate against a driver that "offended" them when they were not on duty.
Could be as simple as taking their parking spot (the old unwritten rules on who's spot it is), giving them the finger because they cut you off, etc.
Before you knew it, you had a ticket in the mail from the City of Philadelphia alleging a moving violation at a place / date and time you weren't there (but they were on duty). Or they found out where you lived and came to your house to explain the facts of life to you.