License Plate-Scanning Company Violates Privacy of Millions of California Drivers, Argues Class Action (sfgate.com) 49
"If you drive a car in California, you may be in for a payday thanks to a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by a Texas company," report SFGate:
The 2021 lawsuit, given class-action status in September, alleges that Digital Recognition Network is breaking a California law meant to regulate the use of automatic license plate readers. DRN, a Fort Worth-based company, uses plate-scanning cameras to create location data for people's vehicles, then sells that data to marketers, car repossessors and insurers.
What's particularly notable about the case is the size of the class. The court has established that if you're a California resident whose license plate data was collected by DRN at least 15 times since June 2017, you're a class member. The plaintiff's legal team estimates that the tally includes about 23 million people, alleging that DRN cameras were mounted to cars on public roads. The case website lets Californians check whether their plates were scanned.
Barring a settlement or delay, the trial to decide whether DRN must pay a penalty to those class members will begin on May 17 in San Diego County Superior Court... The company's cameras scan 220 million plates a month, its website says, and customers can use plate data to "create comprehensive vehicle stories."
A lawyer for the firm representing class members told SFGATE Friday that his team will try to show DRN's business is a "mass surveillance program."
What's particularly notable about the case is the size of the class. The court has established that if you're a California resident whose license plate data was collected by DRN at least 15 times since June 2017, you're a class member. The plaintiff's legal team estimates that the tally includes about 23 million people, alleging that DRN cameras were mounted to cars on public roads. The case website lets Californians check whether their plates were scanned.
Barring a settlement or delay, the trial to decide whether DRN must pay a penalty to those class members will begin on May 17 in San Diego County Superior Court... The company's cameras scan 220 million plates a month, its website says, and customers can use plate data to "create comprehensive vehicle stories."
A lawyer for the firm representing class members told SFGATE Friday that his team will try to show DRN's business is a "mass surveillance program."
Problem/damage? (Score:2)
So what's the problem?
Re:Problem/damage? (Score:4, Insightful)
So what's the problem?
Why does anyone file a class action suit? Because some lawyers said it was a good idea because they smell a payday. The 23 million potential class action members, however, will get enough money to buy a McDonald's cheeseburger, if they're lucky.
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The big benefit of class action lawsuits is not the payout but the deterrent effect.
Companies know that government regulators are toothless, but they live in great fear of law firms.
America has outsourced the enforcement of corporate regulations to the private sector.
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I received $92 from Apple for their throttling settlement.
Re:Problem/damage? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Class actions are a legal fiction meant to solve a couple of problems. First, if the individual damages are too low to mount individual lawsuits, it's more economically expedient to spread the cost over lots of harmed parties. If someone overcharges you $240, it's to
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Re:Problem/damage? (Score:5, Informative)
So what's the problem?
It looks like they are in violation of Cal. Civ. Code 1798.90.5, Section iii. The Notice Requirement (it is long, so I will not post it here).
The law provides specific remedy: "An individual harmed by this statute may bring a civil suit and recover 1) actual damages, but not less than liquidated damages in the amount of $2,500, 2) punitive damages upon proof of willful or reckless disregard of the law, 3) reasonable attorney’s fees and other litigation costs reasonably incurred, and 4) other preliminary and equitable relief as the court determines to be appropriate."
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I you or I followed people around like this it would be called stalking.
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In the 1960s, the supreme court ruled that the right to privacy is implied by multiple amendments to the constitution.
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The state is compelling you to take actions in public (display a license plate), and then a private company is aggregating those compelled actions to infer what you do in private. The problem isn't the pictures of the license plates.
Never trust anyone with surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a cop get very excited about an ALRP system I was working on. It was officially for finding people with expired insurance, and ALPR programs were partially funded by insurance companies.
You'd have an ALPR vehicle not even driving around, just parked and scanning, and handing off the task of pulling people over to other cars. You know what happened? They stopped using the system that way, because it created too much work dealing with expired tags.
What got him excited was expanding the system to multiple vehicles and driving around parking lots all over the city, logging everything so he could track everyone's movements and try to correlate them with crime patterns to create suspect lists. He had absolutely no conception of why that might be wrong.
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... create suspect lists.
Because criminals always use parking lots, because every criminal owns a car? It's obvious that; owns a car, drove car to a parking lot, committed a crime; won't identify one-time criminals and won't include the most common criminal archetype: Teenagers.
The cop's attitude that surveillance will provide all the answers, of course means his car should report its location (to a third party), so people know he isn't committing a crime.
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>The cop's attitude that surveillance will provide all the answers, of course means his car should report its location (to a third party), so people know he isn't committing a crime.
They're almost all tracked these days via their vehicle and with newer radios even the portable on their hip. This does not go to a third party, because then you'd be able to correlate their location and velocity with their dispatch status and note they speed like demons all over the place when not on urgent emergency calls.
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It's a question of proportionality. Collecting and storing everyone's data all the time is massive over-reach. Having the camera look for specific vehicles known to have e.g. expired insurance, and then alerting a specific law enforcement agent when they get a hit, is much less intrusive.
Public is not private (Score:1)
I don't think this scanning should be against the law.
Privacy is not about what you do in public.
When you're out and about, people can see you. They can report on what you do. They can even take and publish photographs and videos of what you do.
It makes no sense at all to me to require the state to officially "not know" the things you do in full view of the world.
Re:Public is not private (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah for all of human history we have had an inherent and inalienable right to not be mass-surveilled (while not having any protection against stuff like rape or murder). Only now has it become possible to violate that right, and you can bet your least favorite politician is salivating at the thought.
Re:Public is not private (Score:4, Insightful)
While i agree with what you are saying - i take issue that in order to effectively move around in public we are required to display a unique identifier which was never intended to be a tracking device, and this tech turns it into effectively a tracking device.
if we went the other side and a state tried to require GPS trackers be put in every plate issued and the telemetry tracked and stored - that would get killed in the courts so fast, as it should...
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Great argument.
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So you don't mind if I put a tracker on your phone
I have AT&T service. So you're not going to be tracking much.
Re: Public is not private (Score:2)
How do we opt out?
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Its not the state doing it. I think at the very least this for profit company should have to pay me a fair price for using my unique identifier that I paid for with my own hard earned money, and for generating the events they report on.
In the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
There is often a police car near the ALPR, or the ALPR is in the police car, so if your license plate is one where tax or insurance has not been paid, they will follow you and stop you immediately. And speeding cameras, red light cameras may have one. But the biggest reason is to catch uninsured drivers.
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>Automatic license plate readers can be used legally to detect license plates where tax or insurance has not been paid, license plates of cars involved in a traffic violation, fake license plates that shouldn't exist, and license plates of cars reported stolen.
The way it should be done. My opinion is that the systems should not be able to do mass collection for later use, they should only be recording 'hits' against a database of plates where the car is known not to be on the roads legally - in addition
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Both "1984" and "V for Vendetta" were projections of British tendencies... (when i first read 1984 i thought it was about the Soviet Union / Eastern block and only later did i learn who wrote it and when and why)
I thought it was overblown, but then during Covid to read how the brits were informing on eachother for being out during curfew or "going for a second run" when only one bout of exercise was allowed. (e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-en... [bbc.com] )
To be "just a touch" dramatic: why did the West even both
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Both "1984" and "V for Vendetta" were projections of British tendencies... (when i first read 1984 i thought it was about the Soviet Union / Eastern block and only later did i learn who wrote it and when and why)
I'm going to have to stop you right there. Nineteen Eighty-Four was a warning, Orwell was about as subtle with his imagery as a brick to the face. He made it no secret that it was a warning against Nazi Fascism. The subject of the 2 minutes hate, Goldstien, had a very Jewish name and very Jewish description. The party was called IngSoc, which was short for "English Socialism" but was neither English nor Socialist, both direct references to Nazi and National Socialism. the entire concept of Newspeak was bas
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Automatic license plate readers can be used legally to detect license plates where tax or insurance has not been paid, license plates of cars involved in a traffic violation, fake license plates that shouldn't exist, and license plates of cars reported stolen.
There is often a police car near the ALPR, or the ALPR is in the police car, so if your license plate is one where tax or insurance has not been paid, they will follow you and stop you immediately. And speeding cameras, red light cameras may have one. But the biggest reason is to catch uninsured drivers.
I should explain to the Americans that to drive on a public road in the United Kingdom, your car needs to be taxed (vehicle registration) and insured (insurance is mandatory).
UK law, even before the GDPR prevented ANPR information from being used for marketing purposes, which seems to be the issue in California. I disagree that car parks shouldn't be snitching on people driving without a MOT (smog check) or sans insurance, but I also have no sympathy for those who get caught. I'd just prefer that detecti
I want my free money!!! (Score:2)
But none of the three cars in my household were scanned even once! Unfair!
Re: I want my free money!!! (Score:2)
My 2015 car was never scanned either. My husband's 2017 car was scanned 19 times.
CXorporate States of 'Murica (Score:1)
How could this work? (Score:2)
It's just a license plate, am I right.
Somewhere along the line, they are getting access to the database of owner names, addresses, etc.
How else can they correlate plates to ownership for "marketers, car repossessors and insurers"?
Seems to me that's where the real stink is coming from.
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Ding ding ding! This is about the PII behind those plates, not the plates themselves.