Police scanner tech inspires privacy queries

The Automatic Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) program, piloted by the RCMP in British Columbia in 2006 and since adopted by several other provinces, sounds like a pretty neat piece of tech.
 
A police officer used to have to key in the licence plate on a suspicious vehicle manually, but in a cruiser outfitted with the system – two cameras and some software – now they can scan thousands of licence plates an hour with better than 95 percent accuracy.

Scanned plates can be checked in seconds against ICBC and Canadian Police Information Centre “hot lists” of stolen vehicles or unlicensed or uninsured drivers.

Once they get a “hit,” photos of the plate are automatically time-stamped, marked with GPS coordinates, and stored. Pretty efficient, eh?

What troubles some civil rights advocates is what the technology could be used for.

Rob Wipond, a writer with B.C.'s Focus magazine, is particularly concerned because though B.C. police have 42 cars equipped with ALPR – which costs $27,000 per vehicle – they're not very good at explaining what they're doing with data collected by the system.

In an article entitled "Hidden Surveillance," Wipond explains that despite assurances from the police, the system has never been reviewed by a governmental privacy commission at any level.

Furthermore, Wipond found the system has a pretty broad definition of what constitutes a "hit."

"[Your car's] movements are tracked and recorded if you’re on parole or probation or, in some cases, you’ve simply been accused of breaking a criminal law, federal or provincial statute, or municipal bylaw," writes Wipond. "You’re also a hit if you ever attended court to establish legal custody of your child, if you’ve ever had an incident due to a mental health problem which police attended, or if you’ve been linked to someone under investigation."

A "hit" is kept in the system's records for two years, which confused Wipond and his research team, since the car-thief-catching ALPR was supposed to be doing could, at least in theory, be done in real-time, with no need to store such info.

In probing the RCMP for more information on the in-house Privacy Impact Assessment they'd conducted, Wipond came across an interesting contradiction: the assessment declared licence plate photos are not "personal information," and thus not subject to certain privacy laws.

But when he then asked for the hit data from the system via an Access to Information request, an analyst told him such data was exempt from the act. "Licence plates and such would be personal information,” he was told.

The same distinction cropped up when Wipond talked to the RCMP's Sgt. Warren Nelson. He said the only information in the system is "lists of numbers...and that image of the licence plate or the image of your car are in there, [but] neither are personal.”

When Wipond asked why the RCMP needed to hold on to "hit" data for two years, though, he was told it was as part of "a requirement for police under the Privacy Act—but that requirement applies only to 'personal information.'"

Partners on Wipond's research team explain that if this data is kept and tracked, police could potentially try to infer a lot about us based on our cars.

"This isn’t just as simple as I collected a licence plate and I checked it against a database. It’s a geographic piece of information that says this person and this person were in the same place," says Kevin McArthur, a web architecture developer and civil rights advocate.

"And when you start doing social network analysis or group analysis, you can learn associations, you can start to make inferences.”  

Is a photo of your licence plate personal information or is it public? What about the location of your car at particular times? Check out Wipond's article and sound off below.

(The Focus)