Automatic license plate readers are becoming commonplace as various government and private institutions are amassing huge databases of surveillance data. They are watching to see where you are, where you have been and where you might be going.
This information has not proven to be particularly effective in fighting crime, and that makes one wonder why they are being used so much. One of the reasons is profit as explained in this article.
This information has not proven to be particularly effective in fighting crime, and that makes one wonder why they are being used so much. One of the reasons is profit as explained in this article.
License Plate Readers Track You for Profit
As license plate readers proliferate,
law enforcement and private business are pooling surveillance data in
light of conflicting guidelines on how long they may retain the data,
which often is marketed for profit, according to a report by the
American Civil Liberties Union.
The report, You Are Being Tracked: HowLicense Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’Movements,” (.pdf) paints, for the first time, a broad, Orwellian
picture of an often overlooked and growing feature of the
surveillance — one funded, in part, by $50 million in federal
grants to local governments during the past five years.
The autonomous readers — small
cameras affixed to police vehicles, light poles, bridges, street
signs, buildings, you name it — chronicle a vehicle’s whereabouts
to the second. Only a fraction of photos provide an immediate “hit”
matching the vehicle to a crime. At least one town, the affluent San
Francisco suburb of Tiburon, has cameras operating on the only road
leading into and out of town. Nationwide, the authorities and even
private enterprise maintain a trove of locational data on citizens’
movements, according to the report.
Data from these cameras, according to
the report, “is being placed into databases, and is sometimes
pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases
of motorists’ location information are being created. All too
frequently, these data are retained permanently and shared widely
with few or no restrictions on how they can be used.”
The standards by which the authorities
may access the data varies. In the Northern California town of
Pittsburg, for example, local police may analyze the database for
“any routine patrol operation or criminal investigation,” and
“reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required,”
according to the report. In Scarsdale, New York, the barrier for
access “is only limited by the officer’s imagination.”
The report also illuminates a network
of private companies — many in the repossession business — that
scan 50 million license plates a month in major metropolitan areas
and sell the data to law enforcement agencies.
“These huge databases of plate
information are not subject to any data security or privacy
regulations governing license plate reader data,” the report said.
“These companies decide who can access license plate data and for
what purposes.”
