From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/jul/17/million-american-license-plate-privacy-tracking
Alarming number of databases across US are storing details of Americans’ locations – not just government agencies
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 July 2013
Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.
A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.
“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Crump said that the creeping growth of licence plate scanners echoed the debate over the National Security Agency. “It raises the same question as the NSA controversy: do we want to live in a world where the government makes a record of everything we do – because that’s what’s being created by the growth of databases linked to license plate readers.”
ACLU based their research on the results of freedom of information requests to 300 police departments and other agencies nationwide that generated 26,000 pages of documents. The mountain of training materials, internal memos and policy statements retrieved by the group has opened a door on a previously little understood world.
Crump said that it’s impossible to put a figure on the scale of the license plate scanning phenomenon as information still remains patchy. But what is clear is that by using scanners mounted on police patrol cars, on road signs and bridges and outside public buildings such as libraries and schools, databases are now storing millions of data points.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/jul/17/million-american-license-plate-privacy-tracking
