A little noticed surveillance technology,
designed to track the movements of every passing driver, is fast
proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers,
mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, use
small, high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.
The information captured by the readers – including the license plate
number, and the date, time, and location of every scan – is being
collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a
result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information
are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years or
even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy
rights.In July 2012, ACLU affiliates in 38 states and Washington sent public records act requests to almost 600 local and state police departments, as well as other state and federal agencies, to obtain information on how these agencies use license plate readers. In response, we received 26,000 pages of documents detailing the use of the technology around the country. Click on the map icon on the right to learn how police in your state use license plate readers to track people's movements.
Learn what’s happening to your location information from this interactive slideshow:
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The documents paint a startling picture of
a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for
mass routine location tracking and surveillance. License plate readers
can serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose when they alert police to
the location of a car associated with a criminal investigation. But
such instances account for a tiny fraction of license plate scans, and
too many police departments are storing millions of records about
innocent drivers. Moreover, private companies are also using license
plate readers and sharing the information they collect with police with
little or no oversight or privacy protections. A lack of regulation
means that policies governing how long our location data is kept vary
widely.
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. The tracking of people’s location constitutes a significant invasion of privacy, which can reveal many things about their lives, such as what friends, doctors, protests, political events, or churches a person may visit.
In our society, it is a core principle that the government does not invade people’s privacy and collect information about citizens’ innocent activities just in case they do something wrong. Clear regulations must be put in place to keep the government from tracking our movements on a massive scale.
As the technology spreads, the
ACLU calls for the adoption of legislation and law enforcement agency
policies adhering to the following principles:
License plate readers may be used by law enforcement agencies only
to investigate hits and in other circumstances in which law enforcement
agents reasonably believe that the plate data are relevant to an
ongoing criminal investigation.
The government must not store data about innocent people
for any lengthy period. Unless plate data has been flagged, retention
periods should be measured in days or weeks, not months and certainly
not years.
People should be able to find out if plate data of vehicles registered to them are contained in a law enforcement agency’s database.
Law enforcement agencies should not share license plate reader data
with third parties that do not follow proper retention and access
principles. They should also be transparent regarding with whom they
share license plate reader data.
Any entity that uses license plate readers should be required to report its usage publicly on at least an annual basis.
REPORT
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