In early 2023, I was thinking back to my Friend Cam who setup a Raspberry PI webcam on the roof of our college house (this was some time in 2019), and port forwarded it so that we could view it remotely. It was cool to look at how the snow melted or got plowed throught the day. It was also cool as Aaron was out of state on coop, and he would look at the weather too. Added to our group chat conversation.
He was talking about making it so it had facial recognition so you could see who was home at the time. Would have been a cool idea, but as most ideas like that go, it fell through the cracks. Just a few months ago, I was thinking back to this and how to traking other things using methods similar to this. I had the mental image in my head of two cameras, one on either side of a highway pointed in either directoin, reading license plates like some police cars do. Since you then have stationary points with cars going either direction on the highway, you can track the comings and goings of cars by just watching the license plates go by!
I feel that this is a pretty simple thing to setup. If you have a few locations that you can post these cameras along the highway, or even your street, you can track the direction and even more detailed itinerary of a person. However, I wanted to take it a step further.
I was lead to the conclusion that although this is something that could be implemented easially, it would be pretty costly to make all of these devices and to deploy them all over. This lead me to the thought process of what other cameras would be available for this purpose? Teslas of course (well, Teslas or other self driving vehicles that come with all of the cameras and the ability to export their video)! This would actually give another level of tracking ability, as it is a mobile camear that drive around the city, picking up tons of licenseplates with location and time data attached! Capture that footage > put it through a machine vision program to identify the plates > export the timestamps of the lat/long, licensplate number, and time to a SQL db > visualize it in tableau or some other software filtering by licenseplate number
Now imagine, this is done with all Tesla/smart vehicles. It would quite literelly be a fleet of mobile security cameras, with the ability to triangulate the routes of anyone.
Another thought that I've had is the use of this with law enforcement. I would honestly not be suprised if there is currently, or in the future, some sort of way that law enforcement can supena Tesla to give recorded footage of all Tesla cars near a specific area during a range of dates to assist in investigations. They are already doing it with Ring doorbells, why not your car?
Pretty fun distopian stuff to think about for a few weeks on end ^^