Massachusetts Plans To Keep Track of Where Your Car Has Been

Attila Dimedici writes "Massachusetts wants to establish a database with the information gathered by license plate scanners installed in police cars. The scanners will scan license plates of every car the police vehicle passes and transmit that information (along with the location) to a database that will be made available to various government agencies. The data wil be kept indefinitely."

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Re:Fight the Power

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been thinking about having an SQL injection bumper sticker made. I would do it in reflective material and OCR friendly font. I think just a simple ');-- immediately to the left of the plate should do.

Re:Old Laws Before Automation

[John Bresnahan]

In Florida, the cops download a list of license plates of interest and only check scanned plates against the list instead of uploading everything they scan to a database

Ever since I moved to Florida, I've wondered why almost everyone backs into parking spaces, rather than pulling in as most people did in Illinois.

Someone finally explained to me that it is because in Florida, cars only have a real license plate, and by backing in, that plate ins't visible to passing police cars. In Illinois, cars have plates on the front and backs of cars.

I understand the desire for privacy, but it does worry me that so many people here seem to feel the need to "hide" from the police.

Protecting records of "public ephemeral" facts

[DragonWriter]

I think the problem rests in old case law, developed when automation like this was just science fiction, that anything not on private property is fair game. We need a new legal concept of "public but ephemeral" that applies to information that is normally soon forgotten like who was in a parking lot a week ago.

I agree, in general, though there is room to quibble about whether the gap in the law is best sourced to "old case law" or to the fact that the Constitution itself doesn't consider the issue of public ephemeral data.

Any collection of ephemeral data that occurs without a warrant should itself expire within a short period of time as well should be distribution limited - i.e. no sending it off to another database at the FBI that is exempt.

That may still be too much of a slippery slope, because once its collected there will always be pressure to extend the retention and expand the distribution. All it would take is one kid getting kidnapped and the license plate data expiring a day before the cops thought to look at it and voila, ready-made emotional argument to push for doubling retention time.

Alternatively, you could retain the data indefinitely, but require a warrant for the search of the historical data, specifying the search parameters and providing the cause justifying the search. This would give non-current public ephemeral data similar protection to traditional private data, while at the same time not destroying the data itself. Since the data can be searched with a warrant issued with cause, this eliminates the risk of mandated destruction destroying evidence that could have solved a crime -- and thus eliminates the opportunity for exploiting that as the basis for lobbying for extension in the "casual search" window for the data.

Amazing Invasion of Privacy

[MoldySpore]

I work with dozens of police organizations that use license plate readers. They are extremely effective and even a small fleet of cars can easily gather thousands upon tens of thousands of license plates a day in their jurisdiction. Tracking people via this technology is a scary thing to think about because it would be extremely effective. I disagree with their use in regular police operations, so this database is just plain crazy in my mind. This should be fought against by anyone who values the small amount of privacy we have left in this country.

I can't stress enough how crazy this would be if this happened and started getting adopted outside of MA. This would be one of the worst invasions of privacy ever. There is already enough tracking that goes on with the toll passes (EZ-Pass, Sun Pass, etc) in all the states that have them as well as all the cameras that are up everywhere in most major cities. But that should be expected, as you are voluntarily signing up for the convenience of speedier tolls and most of the camera systems are used to help detect crimes (such as ShotSpotter hearing gun shots and dispatching police). But if you choose to not have any kind of electronic pass or GPS in your car, there should be a reasonable expectation of privacy.