The Repo Man Is Going High Tech and Some People Are Freaked Out
Repo men — people who are employed by companies to find and repossess consumer property, most infamously cars — have a slightly negative image. What we think of is an old, fat balding guy with a sleazy personality, who eats lunch at strip clubs, and sneaks out under the cover of darkness to tow away cars driven by those behind on their payments. But something funny has happened to that image: It's getting a makeover thanks to technology — quite the unlikely ally.
The key to the repo renaissance? License plate scanners. A license plate scanner is a rather simple gadget that mounts to a dashboard and scans every single plate it sees; then sends the info to a data company. That data company then sells that information to any number of interested parties. Plate scanners have actually been around since the 1970s, but only recently has the tech gotten advanced enough that they've dropped in price. As The Boston Globe reports, the new, improved scanners "use high-speed cameras and optical character recognition technology to capture up to 1,800 plates per minute, even at high rates of speed and in difficult driving conditions. The scanner also records the date, time, and GPS location of each scan."
High-Speed Scanning Power
New scanners "use high-speed cameras and optical character recognition technology to capture up to 1,800 plates per minute, even at high rates of speed and in difficult driving conditions."
That's very enticing to a repo man. Every plate that turns up in default and thus in need or repossession can earn them between $200 and $400. And the best part is all they have to do is live their normal lives. They simply drive around and scan as they go. Though the good ones go where the defaults tend to be hiding. "Honestly, we’ve found random apartment complexes and shopping plazas that are sweet spots," one repo man told BetaBoston. It seems not all stereotypes are wrong.
Of course these plate scanners are being met with a lot of pushback. Jonathan Hecht, a Massachusetts congressman, has already introduced a bill that would drastically reduce the people who can use scanners. Hect believes that only law enforcement officers should have access to the technolgy, because right now it's out of hand. "We need to have a conversation about how to balance legitimate uses of this technology with protecting people’s legitimate expectation of privacy," he said in the same BetaBoston piece.
The ACLU is even more against the scanners than Hecht. In a recent report on the products, the pro-privacy organization condemned scanners, explaining: "Automatic license plate readers have the potential to create permanent records of virtually everywhere any of us has driven, radically transforming the consequences of leaving home to pursue private life, and opening up many opportunities for abuse."
"We need to have a conversation about how to balance legitimate uses of this technology with protecting people’s legitimate expectation of privacy."
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The problem for opponents of the scanners is that they bring in money. Not just for repo men, but for banks who are looking to get property seized, and for the data companies that crunch the numbers. Anytime a lot of money is tied up in something, it tends to stick around. Which probably has repo men everywhere smiling.
[Image via Flickr - Clyde Robinson]
