So you can make your own judgement about the morality of this, but here's a system that I worked on and I sleep just fine at night[1]. I'm a privacy-conscious guy, and nothing I saw working on this made me particularly uneasy.
Highway Weigh Stations are ostensibly there to ensure safe commercial vehicle operations. The system I worked on had a number of different sensors. A mile or so before the weigh station, there was a weight-in-motion (WIM) scale embedded in the highway; this part of the system measures (somewhat coarsely) the weight of the vehicle and counts the number of axles it has. Around there, there's also an ALPR and a USDOT reader[2]. Using the weight, ALPR, and USDOT information, a decision is made as to whether the vehicle is required to check in at the weigh station (which is indicated using a road-side sign). There's no fine yet or anything, vehicles are just flagged for further inspection based on:
- measured weight vs GVWR
- company history / safety rating
- a few other factors that I don't recall off the top of my head
There's a few more ALPR cameras sprinkled throughout the weigh station itself, and another one on the highway past the station. These ones are used to track the motion of the vehicle through the system. For example, if a truck has been flagged to stop, and it instead skips the station and keeps on going, the system knows right away that they've bypassed and can send out an enforcement officer. Alternatively, if the plate is seen at the (more accurate static) scale at the station, the system automatically correlates the weight and the plate, and if it's within range, the driver can sometimes leave without even having to interact with any enforcement officers.
[1] Note that it specifically ignored non-commercial traffic unless there was something really weird going on. Categorically was not keeping persistent records of all traffic.
[2] Funny enough, there's no significant regulations specifying the exact font/size/placement for USDOT information, so a reliable USDOT camera is significantly harder to make than a reliable ALPR.
There's a dead reply to my comment that I'd like to address anyway, in a slightly glib manner:
> How hard would it be to remove those bits that ignored non-commercial traffic?
Code-wise? It'd be really easy to add an INSERT that stuffs extra data into another table. But as far as "removing the bits that ignore non-commercial traffic", none of the non-commercial traffic would be in the datasets provided by the various federal agencies (whose acronyms I forget).
Performance-wise? The whole thing is a giant mass of Oracle PL/SQL that can barely keep up with the commercial traffic. If we tried processing all non-commercial traffic through the scoring algorithms etc, the whole house of cards would fall down :D
How hard would it be to remove those bits that ignored non-commercial traffic? You might be a privacy conscious guy, but what is to stop the owner of this code base from removing this if statement? I am sure a company like Infosys would be happy to take on a project like this, and throw some less liberty minded people at the problem.
Highway Weigh Stations are ostensibly there to ensure safe commercial vehicle operations. The system I worked on had a number of different sensors. A mile or so before the weigh station, there was a weight-in-motion (WIM) scale embedded in the highway; this part of the system measures (somewhat coarsely) the weight of the vehicle and counts the number of axles it has. Around there, there's also an ALPR and a USDOT reader[2]. Using the weight, ALPR, and USDOT information, a decision is made as to whether the vehicle is required to check in at the weigh station (which is indicated using a road-side sign). There's no fine yet or anything, vehicles are just flagged for further inspection based on:
- measured weight vs GVWR
- company history / safety rating
- a few other factors that I don't recall off the top of my head
There's a few more ALPR cameras sprinkled throughout the weigh station itself, and another one on the highway past the station. These ones are used to track the motion of the vehicle through the system. For example, if a truck has been flagged to stop, and it instead skips the station and keeps on going, the system knows right away that they've bypassed and can send out an enforcement officer. Alternatively, if the plate is seen at the (more accurate static) scale at the station, the system automatically correlates the weight and the plate, and if it's within range, the driver can sometimes leave without even having to interact with any enforcement officers.
[1] Note that it specifically ignored non-commercial traffic unless there was something really weird going on. Categorically was not keeping persistent records of all traffic.
[2] Funny enough, there's no significant regulations specifying the exact font/size/placement for USDOT information, so a reliable USDOT camera is significantly harder to make than a reliable ALPR.