Wired: While people put up signs in their yards or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people of their views and potentially influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says it’s intended for “human-scale visibility.” not to that of machines. “They may want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don’t necessarily want to be registered in a national database that law enforcement can access,” Stanley says. Weist says the system, at a minimum, should be able to filter out images that do not contain license plate data and not make errors. “Any number of times is too many, especially when it comes to finding things like what people are wearing or lawn signs,” Weist says. “License plate recognition (LPR) technology supports public safety and community services, from helping find kidnapped children and stolen vehicles to automating toll collection and reducing insurance premiums by mitigating insurance fraud,” says Jeremiah DRN President Wheeler said in a statement. Weist believes that given the relatively small number of images showing bumper stickers compared to the large number of vehicles that have them, Motorola Solutions may be attempting to filter images containing bumper stickers or other text. Wheeler did not respond to WIRED’s questions about whether there are limits on what can be searched in license plate databases, why images of houses with lawn signs but no vehicles in sight appeared in search results, or if filters are used to reduce these images. “DRNsights complies with all applicable laws and regulations,” says Wheeler. “The DRNsights tool allows authorized parties to access license plate information and associated vehicle information that is captured in public locations and visible to everyone. Access is restricted to customers for certain purposes permitted by law, and those who violate these purposes have their access revoked.”