TL;DR: I'm writing a program that could be used by a malicious user to track people. Do I license it under GPLv3 to guarantee user freedom, or do I use a more restrictive license to prevent abuse?
Introduction
Hello! I'm a software developer with quite a bit of experience in automotive electronics, and I've run into a bit of an ethical dilemma, and I'd like to get some input from people who care about the same issues I do.
ALPR
If you already know what ALPR is, you can skip to the next section.
As a brief background for those who aren't familiar, automated license plate recognition (ALPR) is a rapidly growing technology that detects, records, and logs license plates, typically on public roads. This technology is almost always pushed as a safety measure to protect the populations under surveillance. The argument generally goes that people should be willing to give up some privacy if it means helping police identify stolen vehicles, AMBER alerts, and more. If you're a member of this Lemmy community, I don't think I need to explain why I think this is a terrible idea.
V0LT Predator
Predator is my attempt to take on this industry with a highly private alternative to traditional ALPR. In short, Predator is completely open source, runs entirely locally (with no telemetry/data mining), and uses independent hot-lists to decide what plates to alert to. The idea is that instead of a government agency setting up thousands of cameras to track hundreds of thousands of vehicles, individual users can set up cameras in their own vehicles, and help track down relevant vehicles (like AMBER alerts with associated license plates) indepdently. I figure this bottom-up approach can reduce the severity of mass surveillance and data centralization without entirely giving up the advantages of ALPR.
The danger with ALPR is when someone has access to so much centralized data that they can form a map of everywhere a specific vehicle has been. This is not something that's realistically possible on the scale of an individual user operating independently.
I realize many people will probably be entirely opposed to the idea of building an ALPR platform in the first place, but I hope you can understand my motivation.
Growth
Predator started as a brief personal challenge, but rapidly turned into one of my most advanced products. As far as I can tell, it is currently the only active open source ALPR ecosystem, and is the most popular alternative to SaaS ALPR platforms like Rekor and Flock Safety.
The issue is that this growth came with surging demand for many of the features supported by traditional ALPR services. I've had to walk a very fine line with making Predator valuable enough as a product to replace traditional mass-surveillance without turning it into a mass-surveillance product in itself. My decision making when considering new features has primarily been based on these two features:
- Is this feature useful to individual private users? (people with Predator dash-cams, home security systems, etc)
- Would this feature make it easier for a state agency or company to conduct mass surveillance?
As I'm sure you can image, this is an extremely gray area, but I think I've managed to walk the line pretty effectively so far.
The Problem
That leads us to the latest problem. There's been a lot of interest in some kind of product to organize and centralize license plate data collected by individual Predator instances. For example, a university police department running parking enforcement might want to identify plates that haven't purchased a parking pass. I think this use-case is fair, since all vehicles being monitored implicitly consent by purchasing a pass, and vehicles are not followed off-campus. That being said, this is one of those products I've been hesitant to add, since it would absolutely make it possible to use Predator as a mass surveillance tool.
The other day, I started developing a system like this internally, and it was a bit terrifying how effectively it worked. With a $80 off-the-shelf camera system, I was able to track dozens of vehicles after driving around for ~15 minutes.
The Dilemma
Here's the dilemma. If I hosted this service as an online-only product (which is the current plan), I could pretty effectively prevent it from being used for mass surveillance. For example, I plan to limit accounts to a few hundred unique vehicles unless they apply for an override. Customers with legitimate use cases can be granted overrides with geofenced areas to fill their use-case (i.e. the university campus from the previous example). However, this significantly compromises user control, since they would have to go through my services to use the product.
Typically, I would prefer to make the software entirely open source and self-hostable under the AGPLv3. However, this would make it trivially easy for a government agency or business to set up a mass scale surveillance system.
I'm struggle to decide how to approach this issue. Have I backed myself into a corner with this one? I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this dilemma, and the Predator ecosystem as a whole.
