Yahoo Autos One Company Is Selling Location Data for Billions of License Plates to Police
The Fourth Amendment in our Constitution prohibits unlawful search and seizure, which protects most of us from having things like GPS trackers fitted to our cars without a good reason. However, as with other laws, there's a loophole, and an aptly (if not sinisterly) named company called Vigilant Solutions seems to be exploiting it.
Vigilant is a private corporation that collects photos of cars and trucks through a massive network of inconspicuous cameras. To date, it's acquired about 2.2 billion license-plate photos, according to The Atlantic. The cameras taking these photos aren't in private homes, but they're everywhere else: apartment complexes, shopping malls, and businesses with big parking lots. Each photo is logged with location data, which Vigilant Solutions then sells.
Who's buying this data? The police, for one. Vigilant Solutions has about 3000 law-enforcement agencies as clients, which means that 30,000 polices officers can access the photos. And it's perfectly legal, writes The Atlantic:
To install a GPS tracking device on your car, your local police department must present a judge with a rationale that meets a Fourth Amendment test and obtain a warrant. But if it wants to query a database to see years of data on where your car was photographed at specific times, it doesn't need a warrant-just a willingness to send some of your tax dollars to Vigilant Solutions, which insists that license plate readers are "unlike GPS devices, RFID, or other technologies that may be used to track." Its website states that "LPR is not ubiquitous, and only captures point in time information. And the point in time information is on a vehicle, not an individual."
Because it's not legal to install a tracking device, this is the next best thing. And repeatedly collecting little snippets of data like this is like taking a million snapshots: At the end, you have a pretty thorough record of someone's whereabouts. As The Atlantic notes, this isn't the first time we've seen controversy over license-plate recognition technology, with police departments throughout the country acquiring the capability through federal grants.
Still, this information isn't widely known to most Americas, who guard their right to privacy fiercely. One one hand, it's extremely useful when photographic evidence is needed in the courtroom-a photo will almost always be more reliable than the fragile human memory. On the other, the potential violation of privacy is a serious concern worth exploring.
For more, the original article from The Atlantic is definitely worth your time.
