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Will Freeman wants people to know they are being followed.
His desire to shine a light on the proliferation of license plate readers in his Huntsville, Alabama, neighborhood spurred the idea this year for a crowdsourced database where people around the world could upload the locations of their readers. Ta. The database, called DeFlock, also gives users the option to list the camera manufacturer for added transparency.
“Everything that’s out there is just a tiny fraction of what actually exists,” Freeman said of the thousands of cameras listed in his project.
Over the past decade, license plate readers have become a useful tool for law enforcement agencies across the country. But privacy advocates are sounding the alarm about the technology, arguing that the cameras could track people without their consent and that the data stored on them could be vulnerable to bad actors.
Freeman has about 20,000 pending data points that he plans to add to the global map. DeFlock, first reported by 404 Media, comes as more local governments and private homeowners turn to surveillance technology to fight crime.
Freeman’s idea to make technology more transparent started when he posted some waterproof pages in his Alabama neighborhood.
“The page said ‘License Plate Reader’ and an arrow pointing up,” Freeman said. “They were all removed within days.”
Undeterred, Freeman did what any software engineer would do when faced with such an obstacle: In other words, I solved the problem online. “Some people defend their existence, but I don’t think it’s worth it,” he said of license plate readers.
More than 1,600 automatic license plate readers dot intersections and roadways in Riverside County. The cameras detect millions of vehicles over a 30-day period and are intended to assist police in searching for stolen vehicles and other investigations. License plate readers are also installed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Boston, and other major cities.
Riverside County contracted with Flock Security to establish a network of license plate readers. The county’s public transparency portal provides a snapshot of the system. In October, the city of Los Angeles installed about 100 license plate readers in the San Fernando Valley at a cost of about $500,000 to fight crime. The license plate reader is manufactured by Motorola Solutions and, like most others, can detect the make, model, and color of your vehicle while recording your GPS location, date, and time.
If a camera captures a vehicle that has been reported stolen, it alerts police, but law enforcement agencies also store vast amounts of data about every other vehicle on the road. Critics say the data could fall into the wrong hands or be misused.
“We’ve seen law enforcement officers themselves use the data for their own purposes,” said Dave Mars, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That should be scary for everyone, because it’s not the government’s business where we go in life.”
A 2020 California audit found that the Los Angeles Police Department, Fresno Police Department, Marin County Sheriff’s Office, and Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department improperly stored images of vehicles not included in police investigations. Ta.
Mars said police could theoretically track a person’s whereabouts through data collected by automatic license plate readers without the need for a search warrant or subpoena.
In 2022, police in Wichita, Kansas, decided to revoke access to a license plate reading network after a lieutenant was suspected of using the system to stalk his estranged wife, news station KWCH reported. I was forced to.
California law governs how long data is retained and how it is shared by law enforcement. The information captured by license plate readers is not stored with personally identifiable information unless used in a criminal investigation, the sergeant said. David Chee of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.
Last year, the California State Auditor found that only a small number of law enforcement agencies that use license plate readers had privacy policies in place.
As technology improves, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office relies more on license plate readers.
“We call it ‘catch it now or catch it later,'” Chee said, referring to how the technology will be used. He said the cameras could alert police the moment they register a wanted person’s vehicle as part of an investigation, or authorities could scrutinize images taken as part of the case.
But privacy advocates worry the cameras could be used by law enforcement or others with access to surveillance networks to track people for non-criminal activities.
It could be someone going to a clinic seeking access to an abortion, or it could be a political rally, said Jake Laperuque, deputy director of the Security and Oversight Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The use of cameras has already expanded beyond police stations.
Southern California homeowners associations have pooled their funds to install license plate readers in their neighborhoods to deter crime.
“It’s the type of thing where you have a lot of power to collect information about what people are doing, where they’re going, who they’re interacting with, but how the government uses that information. They have very little power to stop it,” Lapercque said.
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