Privacy World - The WORLD'S SHREWDEST PRIVACY NEWSLETTER
Automated License Plate Readers Threaten Our Privacy
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using
sophisticated cameras, called "automated license plate readers" or
ALPR, to scan and record the license plates of millions of cars across the
country. These cameras, mounted on top of patrol cars and on city streets, can
scan up to 1,800 license plate per minute, day or night, allowing one squad car
to record more than 14,000 plates during the course of a single shift.
Photographing a single license plate one time on a public
city street may not seem problematic, but when that data is put into a
database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets,
and stored forever, it can become very revealing. Information about your
location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your
political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to
the doctor, and your associations with others. And, according to recent
research reported in Nature, it's possible to identify 95% of individuals with
as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time),
making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.
To better gauge the real threat to privacy posed by ALPR,
EFF and the ACLU of Southern California asked LAPD and LASD for information on
their systems, including their policies on retaining and sharing information
and all the license plate data each department collected over the course of a
single week in 2012. After both agencies refused to release most of the records
we asked for, we sued. We hope to get access to this data, both to show just
how much data the agencies are collecting and how revealing it can be.
ALPRs are often touted as an easy way to find stolen cars
- the system checks a scanned plate against a database of stolen or wanted cars
and can instantly identify a hit, allowing officers to set up a sting to
recover the car and catch the thief. But
even when there's no match in the database and no reason to think a car is
stolen or involved in a crime, police keep the data. According to the LA
Weekly, LAPD and LASD together already have collected more than 160 million
"data points" (license plates plus time, date, and exact location) in
the greater LA area-that's more than
20 hits for each of the more than 7 million vehicles
registered in L.A. County. That's a ton of data, but it's not all - law
enforcement officers also have access to private databases containing hundreds
of millions of plates and their coordinates collected by "repo" men.
Image via EFF.org Law enforcement agencies claim that
ALPR systems are no different from an officer recording license plate, time and
location information by hand. They also argue the data doesn't warrant any
privacy protections because we drive our cars around in public. However, as
five justices of the Supreme Court recognized last year in US v. Jones,a case
involving GPS tracking, the ease of data collection and the low cost of data
storage make technological surveillance solutions such as GPS or ALPR very
different from techniques used in the past.
Police are open about their desire to record the
movements of every car in case it might one day prove valuable. In 2008, LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck (then
the agency's chief of detectives) told GovTech Magazine that ALPRs have
"unlimited potential" as an investigative tool. "It's always going to be great for the
black-and-white to be driving down the street and find stolen cars rolling
around . . . . But the real value comes from the long-term investigative uses
of being able to track vehicles-where they've been and what they've been
doing-and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur." But amassing data on the movements of
law-abiding residents poses a real threat to privacy, while the benefit to
public safety is speculative, at best.
In light of privacy concerns, states including Maine, New
Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of ALPRs, and New Hampshire has
banned them outright. Even the
International Association of Chiefs of Police has issued a report recognizing
that "recording driving habits" could raise First Amendment concerns
because cameras could record "vehicles parked at addiction-counseling
meetings, doctors'
offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for
political protests."
But even if ALPRs are permitted, there are still
common-sense limits that can allow the public safety benefits of ALPRs while
preventing the wholesale tracking of every resident's movements.
Police can and should treat location information from
ALPRs like other sensitive information - they should retain it no longer than
necessary to determine if it might be relevant to a crime, and should get a
warrant to keep it any longer. They
should limit who can access it and who they can share it with. And they should put oversight in place to
ensure these limits are followed.
Unfortunately, efforts to impose reasonable limits on
ALPR tracking in California have failed so far. Last year, legislation that
would have limited private and law enforcement retention of ALPR data to 60
days-a limit currently in effect for the California Highway Patrol - and
restricted sharing between law enforcement and private companies failed after
vigorous opposition from law enforcement. In California, law enforcement
agencies remain free to set their own policies on the use and retention of ALPR
data, or to have no policy at all.
Some have asked why we would seek public disclosure of
the actual license plate data collected by the police-location-based data that
we think is private. But we asked
specifically for a narrow slice of data - just a week's worth - to demonstrate
how invasive the technology is. Having
the data will allow us to see how frequently some plates have been scanned;
where and when, specifically, the cops are scanning plates; and just how many
plates can be collected in a large metropolitan area over the course of a
single week. Actual data will reveal whether ALPRs are deployed primarily in
particular areas of Los Angeles and whether some communities might therefore be
much more heavily tracked than others. If this data is too private to give a
week's worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used,
then isn't it too private to let the police amass years' worth of data without
a warrant?
After the Boston Marathon bombings, many have argued that
the government should take advantage of surveillance technology to collect more
data rather than less. But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms
that terrorists seek to destroy. We should recognize just how revealing ALPR
data is and not be afraid to push our police and legislators for sensible
limits to protect our basic right to privacy.
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