I'm being recorded?

The cameras

Automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, are cameras mounted on poles, traffic signals, and patrol cars that photograph vehicles as they pass. Flock Safety sells the most visible version: a small, solar-powered camera on a slim pole, usually pointed at a road, installed by a police department, homeowners association, or business.

They are not red-light cameras, and they do not issue tickets. They photograph passing vehicles and record what they see, including the license plate, vehicle characteristics, and location. The result is a searchable record of vehicles moving through places where these cameras are installed.

What they record

An ALPR does more than read a plate. Vendors advertise the ability to identify a vehicle even when the plate is unreadable, by combining attributes into what Flock markets as a “vehicle fingerprint.” According to the company's own materials, that includes:

• The plate number and issuing state
• Make, model, body type, and color
• Distinguishing features: roof racks, bumper damage, ladder racks, decals
• Bumper stickers, including political, religious, and advocacy stickers
• The time and location of each sighting

A single reading is close to meaningless. A year of readings is a travel history. Flock's published policy sets a default retention window of thirty days, after which records are deleted. Retention is a setting, though, and settings are chosen by whoever holds the contract. In this county alone the answer has ranged from thirty days to a full year, depending on which city you happened to drive through.

Six things worth thinking about

None of what follows assumes bad faith by any department or by the vendor. These are the things the technology raises on its own, before anyone decides how to use it. If you are looking for questions to put to a particular agency, and answers that are a matter of public record, those are on Ask Questions.

1. Whose cars end up in the database

An ALPR does not wait for probable cause. It reads what passes, which means the overwhelming majority of records belong to people who are not suspected of anything. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization that advocates for civil liberties in the digital world, estimates that more than 99.9% of ALPR data is unconnected to any crime. That means the system is not simply looking for suspects. It is routinely recording information about almost everyone who drives past.

2. What a travel history reveals

Where a car goes tends to disclose what a person does. A weekly stop at a mosque, a union hall, an AA meeting, a divorce attorney, a methadone clinic, a reproductive health provider, an immigration lawyer, an oncologist. None of that is visible in a single photograph. All of it becomes visible in a pattern, and a pattern is what these systems are built to produce.

3. Who else can search it

Many ALPR networks allow agencies to share data with other agencies, sometimes across state lines and sometimes with federal partners. That means a camera approved locally to help find stolen cars may also make its data available to agencies far beyond the community that installed it. The important question is not simply who operates the camera, but who can search the records it creates, and under what rules.

4. What the search logs depend on

Vendors point to search logs and required “reason” fields as the safeguard against misuse. Those controls depend entirely on someone reading them. The ACLU reports that officers found they could enter “investigation” or even “hehehe” as a search reason and have it approved. In Johnson County, Texas, officials described a search as looking for a missing person, while another county official's logged searches carried the note “had an abortion, search for female.” A reason field records what someone typed. Only an audit shows whether it was true.

5. When the match is wrong

A misread character, a stale hot list entry, or a plate matched without checking the issuing state can send officers to a vehicle on the assumption that it is stolen. In documented cases, drivers have been ordered out of their cars at gunpoint or even jailed before the error was discovered. An ALPR alert is not proof that a vehicle is stolen, but it can become the starting point for a police response before anyone verifies that the match is correct.

6. The people who already have access

Some people with legitimate access use it for purposes they are not authorized to pursue, such as looking up an ex-partner, a neighbor, or someone else they know. The Institute for Justice has cataloged more than 200 incidents of ALPR abuse, including romantic stalking. In one documented case, an officer used an ALPR system to check a partner's location more than a hundred times. Access rules decide who can log in. They do nothing to stop someone already logged in from tracking a person for personal reasons.