Anti-Automated License Plate Reader Techniques
Defeating high-tech surveillance with low-tech solutions
ALRPs, or automated license plate readers, are placed in static locations or mounted on vehicles and are used to map out the cars in a given area or that pass through a location. These can be used for good — if someone has their car stolen and the thief doesn’t take off your license plate, one of these readers can quickly find the location of your vehicle for efficient recovery. But they can also be used to surveil neighborhoods, showing patterns of movement through your city or state. If the ALPR on a police car shows that every week at the same time I go to a physician’s office, someone could infer that I may have a chronic illness or some other privacy-invading insight.
One way to fight against pervasive surveillance is to simply feed it data that muddies the fingerprint of a given location. An easy and effective way to do this is to display a generic license plate image that ALPRs will recognize and log. Adversarial Fashion pioneered creating anti-ALPR clothing, and we wanted to recreate it to help spread similar concepts.
We started with stock images of California license plates online, found a free license plate font, and used Figma to create basic designs. Using a plugin called Image Tracer, we made vector images of the stock license plate to get the exact California wordmark. Then, it was as simple as using the free font to make whatever vanity name came to mind.
ALPRs don’t need to see actual images of a car and a license plate to recognize something as a license plate. Just providing the generic layout will trigger a positive reading.
I used the Hush Line design above and made patches and t-shirts with the image. You can see below that even though it is a patch, the site platerecognizer.com, which uses ALPR tech to simulate the experience, recognizes it as a license plate from California in the United States. Imagine if hundreds or thousands of people in a city wore similar clothing or accessories. Pretty quickly, the data in the ALPR systems will be nearly unusable , at least in theory.
Conclusion
Surveillance is bad, and it’s typically pushed on us by for-profit entities via our governments. Companies like platerecognizer.com benefit from selling privacy-diminishing tech, and it’s within our powers to fight back with low-tech, effective means.
Here’s the Figma link with mockups you can use for your wearing pleasure.
If you want to purchase our Hush Line anti-ALPR gear, you can find it here: https://shop.scidsg.org/
