- Donut Media teamed up with noRecognition to barely beat a Flock Safety ALPR.
- The car required extensive wrapping, including over the windows, to achieve its goals.
- The method is far from one that everyday citizens can use to opt out of surveillance.
Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are all over the USA, and many citizens want to opt out. The trouble is, there’s no way actually to do that. Donut Media and noRecognition might have a solution. Sadly, it comes with plenty of drawbacks, which include things like making your car easy to spot by human eyes and, oh yeah… blocking your side windows with a wrap.
We first told you about this potential breakthrough back in mid-August. It was then that noRecognition, a brand that makes adversarial patterns for use on clothing, said it had fooled an ALPR. Adversarial patterns can be unrecognizable to AI cameras and thus allow a person to slip through a camera’s view undetected. Donut Media wanted to try the same trick but with a car.
More: Cops Are Being Told To Hide License Plate Readers From Drivers And Reports
To that end, they brought a Toyota Yaris out and began testing. Without any wrap at all, the system spotted the vehicle without issue. The camera used its internal coding to say it was over 90 percent confident it was seeing a vehicle. According to noRecognition’s Bill Swearington, if the camera is less than 75% sure that what it’s seeing is a car, it won’t snap a photo and save it. So the goal is to drop that figure below 75 percent and thus evade the camera.
That said, with the body of the Yaris wrapped in its adversarial pattern, the camera still managed to detect it. In fact, at some moments of the test, it appears as though the pattern had no effect at all. It turns out that Flock Safety cameras do more than simply detect the general shape of a car. They look at details like the wheels, the heat signature, and more. Still, the team didn’t give up.
Next, they wrapped the windows. Yes, they effectively blocked the driver’s vision out of the windows to see what would happen. This time, the camera failed to trigger. That’s objectively a win for the team, but let’s think about this practically. Wrapping a car isn’t a quick fix for anyone. It’s costly, time-consuming, and then there’s the pattern to worry about.
Also: Darth Vader Tells San Diego Council The Empire Loves Its Flock Cameras
Call me crazy, but Donut’s Yaris would be easy to pick out of a lineup of 1,000,000 others. Stack on top of those issues the fact that the team had to cover the windows, and this all turns into an interesting but wildly impractical proof of concept. That all said, Benn Jordan made an appearance and highlighted his adversarial license plate stickers, which are far less obvious and could prove to be another potential loophole. Read more about those here.
Lead Image: Donut Media on Youtube
