Automated Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records On Drivers

schwit1 writes with a report on just how extensive always-on license plate logging has gotten. The article focuses on California; how different is your state? "In San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since 2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego Association of Governments maintains the database. Unlike the Northern California database, which retains the data for between one and two years, the San Diego system retains license-plate information indefinitely. Can we get plate with code to delete the database?"

Re:public?

[TheGratefulNet]

we believe you: you probably DO fail to see why this is such a big deal.

but it is. even if you don't get it.

Re:public?

[Gr8Apes]

Because it's one thing to have an identification item on your car, it's another to track where you are when and store that data. It's no different than the NSA keeping tabs of everyone you know and when you talked to them. If that's not clear, please prep yourself for an anal implant that will collect all data on your person at all times, for the public record.

My Car's Nickname

[Saethan]

I think I'll call my car Little Chevy Tables [xkcd.com].

Data Lifecycle

[onyxruby]

The thing that people need to think about is that data is an asset. Like any asset it has a date of acquisition, a period of usefulness and a time that it should be removed from service. Just like you would have a retention policy for your corporate email or payroll records, you should have a retention policy for all other data.

The key is to define the lifecycle of your data ahead of time - before there are any legal actions against it and within legal compliance requirements. Once you have defined your requirements and useful period of retention you need to purge it and destroy all backups - all as a matter of policy. As long as this is your normal course of business your butt is covered in court.

Government owned data like license plate data should be treated the same way. Since it is publicly owned data the public should have a say in how long it is retained. My suggestion is to simply define a policy with a very short retention period. Normal data would be kept for a week and data that matches up to a criminal investigation (stolen car etc) could be retained per legal requirements.

The balance of the thing between big brother / police state and a bonafide crime fighting tool (these things are really good at catching stolen cars for example) is to define your data retention policy as short as possible and zealously enforce it.

the more data government collects

[Presto Vivace]

the more companies who have a vested interested in surveillance and data mining, the greater the economic and political power of those with a vested interest in continuing and expanding these sorts of practices. It is not a good situation.

Re:Exploits implementation

[gmuslera]

Thats the real world equivalent to the xkcd strip. The problem is, knowing the trend, going in the streets with something like that will surely put you in jail, for years. If they put in jail, for a decade, for scribbling anti-bank messages in sidewalks with washable chalks [rt.com] this will be harder. In fact, is a hack attempt, you could get a century in prison [thenation.com] for that kind of things. Meanwhile, you keep the money and walk free, even if caught screwing the entire world's economy [rollingstone.com]. In their view, law needs justice like a fish needs a bicycle.

Re:Makes it easy for police

[CanHasDIY]

I'm sure the civil-liberties obsessives here would hate the idea of ubiquitous ANPR, but the practicality of the situation is that it works.

Theoretically, rounding every non-government employed citizen up and sending them to the work camps and gas chambers "works" even more effectively...