Anyone know if there’s any legal rulings or decisions on license plate readers (LPRs) and privacy in the US?
I ask because this is the case in Sacramento, California. There are a large number of license plate readers around the city. They record the license plate of the vehicle, and also take a snapshot of it. Meter readers driving around town aren’t just looking for parking violators, but they’re also operating LPRs and recording the data. They drive around parking lots doing the same thing, and also around neighborhoods recording plates of vehicles in front of houses and in driveways. The information is stored for years, at a minimum.
To me it seems wrong as it’s government tracking people. Where they’re going, and who they’re visiting. he counter I hear is “it’s public information, as they’re traveling in the public and have no right to privacy.” But if I were to follow someone around all day, every day, recording where they were traveling, that would be stalking. But because it’s automated and there’s a large government force dedicated to gathering the information, somehow it’s ok. This seems very wrong to me, and I was wondering if this had come up in courts and been challenged before.
I’m not sure that following someone around would be stalking legally. See this cite
In California, for example, stalking is “Any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows or harasses another person and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of his or her immediate family.”
So, following someone around to see if they were committing crimes would probably not be stalking. You don’t have malicious intent and you’re not making a credible threat.
I agree that it’s really problematic and we should limit it. But the law takes a while to catch up to technological changes, and policymakers are loathe to limit the police in any way. It’s part of a larger societal problem. It got really easy to collect a lot of data, and store it forever, and we haven’t grappled with the implications of that very well.
You drive a car at the pleasure of the government. You’re required to register and license the vehicle and you’re required to procure a driver’s license. It seems to me the government has every right to check on the license plate that they issued for any number of reasons – expired tags, license on wrong vehicle (e.g. if a thief swapped some plates to avoid detection), warrant out on vehicle or owner, etc. That you see it as their trying to track your whereabouts sounds somewhat paranoid to me. If it really bothers you, you’re free to walk, take mass transit, or hire a ride (cab, Uber, etc.).
One of the uses for the LPR database is for it to be used to see if a plate has been scanned, and when and where. Not every agency that uses LPRs uses it for that purpose, though.
I worked at a law enforcement agency during the time they were discussing loading ALL LPR scans from every department in the state in to a centralized database.
Since I would have been involved when the project got off the ground, I would have had to refuse to participate due to my sincere objections to such a database.
Fortunately, I left before that came to fruition. I don’t know if it’s a thing now or not.
License Plates: The Sensitive Information You Publicly Display
(I suppose some here will be constrained from seeing the paradox in the above.)
There’s no way license plates can be private, especially from the government which issues them. They’re out in public every time the car is in use, and most of the time it isn’t, and the whole point to their existence is that they’re a unique key into a database maintained by the government to track automobile ownership and usage. Treating them as if they’re private is like treating the cars themselves as if they were private, like it was a big secret that there was a blue Nissan Altima driving around Pittsburgh. It isn’t about policy so much as it’s about basic logic and physics.
I’m not a fan of governments (or private entities) just amassing as much info as they can, absent cause, and THEN deciding what use they can make of it. But I AM somewhat of a personal privacy nut. I’ll point out the obvious, that license plate scans indicate where a VEHICLE is/was, not the individual.
Recently saw something alluding to the HUGE amount of information available from Illinois toll roads, iPass and the like. Just waiting for toll info to be used to issue speeding tickets. The mining of big data is a HUGE developing issue in the legal field.
Except the police aren’t following people around all day. They’re scanning all the plates in a given area. They might be able to put that information together in a way that would give them a rough idea as to your whereabouts over the course of a day or week, but it’s a far cry from stalking.
I used to think that about my phone records until I found out what NSA was doing.
I am not a conspiracy theorist but I do believe that once the government collects data on its citizens, it is vulnerable to misuse/abuse, regardless of the rules.
If this data is used for things like identifying stolen cars or people with outstanding warrants, then such data should used at the time it’s collected and not saved for years or months.
Wasn’t there a recent SCOTUS case that stated tracking a car’s location at various points of time long term amounted to a 4th amendment violation unless there was a warrant?
I also seem to recall a case where the court (not SCOTUS) ruled that LPR readers feeding a centralized database was effectively the same as placing a tracker on the vehicle, and that such a thing was impermissible even when their was no physical interaction with or physical trespass of the vehicle.
SCOTUS’s take on recording tags with cameras and computers is that it’s merely a faster way of doing it than by people with pens and pads. Since they consider the latter to be perfectly okay, what difference does it make legally if you go higher tech?
This was one of the fears when EZ-Pass came out. They know the distance between any two toll points. They know what time you entered & exited. Assuming no traffic jams nor your stopping at a rest stop, they can very easily calculate your average speed. They said they wouldn’t issue tickets based on this to allay fears. Of course when do you expect a politician to keep their word, especially when there’s money in it for them, even if not directly into their pockets fines would free up other funds for other uses so they don’t look bad by raising taxes (as much).
I have been unable to find a SCOTUS decision on this, but this year the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that local police can’t “passively collect data on people who aren’t suspected of criminal activity.”
Quite different from the OP, but vehicle info related - there was a case in the local news lately, where they charged people with murder. The amount of info they were able to pull off the car’s computer was amazing (to me). Not only where the car went, when it stopped, but even which doors were opened.
And, you are required to publicly display that license plate. Some states front and rear, some only on the rear of the car. But you have to display it.
Plate readers are just a technological advancement of what is already required.
Not at all. The requirement to display a plate has nothing to do with the activity of reading all plates and recording their location and maintaining that data. Plates are displayed to verify that a car is properly registered, and to identify a car in case of probable cause that the car was involved in a civil or criminal offense. It is not required so the government can track the movements of everyone who owns a car.