Catherine Crump: The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you. Concerns about license plate readers and privacy. LENEXA, Kan. - Technology police use to track criminals is at the center of a debate over privacy. The American Civil Liberties Union is working with lawmakers to make sure information collected from automatic license plate readers is not misused. The Lenexa Police Department is one of several departments in the area and one of hundreds in the country that use automatic license plate readers to track down criminals. The reader is attached to the back of a police car and takes pictures of license plate numbers and time stamps the location of the car. The devices also alerts officers when there are warrants and felonies associated with a license plate number. Major Layman with the Lenexa Police Department said the readers do not collection names, addresses or other personal information. “It’s just those characters from the license plate.
According to Major Layman, the Lenexa Police Department collects about 10,000 license plate numbers per day. Your car, tracked: the rapid rise of license plate readers. This feature originally ran on August 15, 2012. TIBURON, CALIFORNIA—Tiburon, a small but wealthy town just northeast of the Golden Gate Bridge, has an unusual distinction: it was one of the first towns in the country to mount automated license plate readers (LPRs) at its city borders—the only two roads going in and out of town. Effectively, that means the cops are keeping an eye on every car coming and going. A contentious plan? Not in Tiburon, where the city council approved the cameras unanimously back in November 2009. The scanners can read 60 license plates per second, then match observed plates against a "hot list" of wanted vehicles, stolen cars, or criminal suspects. LPRs have increasingly become a mainstay of law enforcement nationwide; many agencies tout them as a highly effective "force multiplier" for catching bad guys, most notably burglars, car thieves, child molesters, kidnappers, terrorists, and—potentially—undocumented immigrants.
I met Capt. Hitting the hot list. License plates scanned at border, data shared with car insurance group. As public scrutiny continues to mount against the use of license plate readers (LPRs) across the country, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has now released government documents showing that such data, which includes precise GPS location, date, and timestamps, in addition to the plate in question, are shared with an auto insurance umbrella organization. The documents, published on Tuesday as the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, include a six-page memorandum of understanding (MOU) from 2005 between the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) and the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency.
The NICB is a nonprofit organization funded by hundreds of American auto insurance corporations around the country, which "partners with insurers and law enforcement agencies to facilitate the identification, detection, and prosecution of insurance criminals. " "Thousands of vehicles are stolen in the U.S. each year and taken to Mexico," he added. Privacy advocates decry license plate readers.
WASHINGTON -- Drive in the District, and your license plate might be scanned by one of the 250 cameras scattered throughout the city. Local police are storing the data and keeping track of where commuters drive and when, raising privacy concerns for many. Some of the cameras are hidden from view, while others are mounted on top of police cars. The advanced technology can capture 1800 images a minute on cars going as fast as 150 MPH. Police say the technology is useful when hunting criminals, but privacy advocates wonder if law enforcement should be allowed to track innocent citizens without a warrant.
"That's quite a large database of innocent people's comings and goings," Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, told the Washington Post . "The government has no business collecting that kind of information on people without a warrant. " In D.C., police keep the information on file for 3 years. Follow WTOP on Twitter. Life under digits. Update 20/03/2012 This could be titled ‘when reality catch up with science fiction’. How to beleive that your refrigeratoris telling on you to the CIA and your flat screen TV is watching you? Well, it’s all true, read by yourself. - ‘CIA: We’ll spy on you through your refrigerator‘ - ‘Is Your New HDTV Watching You?
- ‘Who is snooping into your address book? - ‘Special Report: Chinese firm helps Iran spy on citizens‘ Do you beleive these technologies are only used in Iran and China? - ‘Investigators question what Google knew, and when‘ - ‘Google asked to clarify privacy policy issues in ongoing EU laws compliance investigation‘ - ‘A clean-sweep of social media permissions‘ - ‘Lessons from Rutgers on privacy and hate speech‘ , the student who set up a spycam to catch roommate Tyler Clementi in a same-sex romantic moment, and tweeted about it.
When security around collected sensitive data is not assured, what do you think about biometrics data collected by governments? - Which consent? Like this: