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.
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points. Flock, a major player, is now worth $8.4 billion. It sells to homeowner associations, malls, and hospitals too, not just police.
These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the powerful tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn’t require a warrant.
All of it goes into a database that thousands of police officers can search. Flock’s numbers, confirmed by NBC News and the ACLU:
- Nearly 90,000 cameras across 49 states
- Over 5,000 police departments as customers
- More than 20 billion license plate scans every month
- 75% of departments feed data into a live national database
Which means an officer in Florida can search your car in Massachusetts. No warrant needed.
Have you been flocked yet?
Go to http://haveibeenflocked.com. Type in your plate number. Hit search. If your local police department’s audit logs have been released through public records requests, (right now, that includes many police departments in California, Colorado, Connecticut, and dozens of other states) you will see every time your plate was searched, who searched it, and the reason they wrote it down.
The site does not have every department yet. It contains those that activists have obtained through legal disclosure requests.
Learn more here: https://www.aclu.org/you-are-being-tracked and here: https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs