Privacy, accuracy concerns as license-plate readers expand Privacy concerns as technology expands into new areas

Denise Green of S.F. was pulled over in 2009 after a license-plate reader mistakenly identified her car as stolen. Denise Green of S.F. was pulled over in 2009 after a license-plate reader mistakenly identified her car as stolen. Photo: Noah Berger Photo: Noah Berger Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Privacy, accuracy concerns as license-plate readers expand 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Denise Green had just dropped off her sister at the 24th Street Mission BART Station when a San Francisco police car with its lights on pulled up behind her and officers yelled, "Put your hands up!"

Sgt. Ja Han Kim ordered her to step out of the car, and as Green complied, she turned and saw several officers with their guns trained on her.

They forced her to her knees, handcuffed her and searched her 1992 Lexus. Green overheard officers standing near her license plate shouting numbers to each other.

"It's not a seven?" one said.

"No, three five zero," another officer replied.

Green, a Muni driver and 50-year-old San Francisco resident, had been detained because an automatic license-plate reader the city had installed on its police cars mistakenly identified her vehicle as stolen. The officers did not confirm her license plate with their dispatcher.

"It was a nightmare," Green said. "I had no idea what was going on or why they were treating me like a criminal."

Five years later, as Green's lawsuit over the incident nears a trial, the use of license-plate readers has emerged as one of the biggest concerns among privacy advocates. Car-tracking technology is becoming ubiquitous in cities around the United States, and the types of data collected and analyzed with the help of license-plate readers is expanding into other realms of personal information.

Documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting show that a leading maker of license-plate readers wants to merge the vehicle identification technology with other sources of identifying information. Vigilant Solutions is pushing a system that eventually could help fuse public records, license plates and facial recognition databases for police in the field.

Livermore firm

The Livermore company released facial recognition software last year for use in stationary and mobile devices. The technology uses algorithms to determine whether a person's face matches that of someone in a law enforcement database. Like license-plate readers, privacy advocates say, the technology can make incorrect identifications that ensnare innocent people.

Vigilant also is the market leader in license-plate data collection. The company runs the Law Enforcement Archive and Reporting Network database, which stores more than 2.5 billion records and adds 70 million new license-plate scans monthly.

Vigilant sells license-plate readers to more than a dozen California agencies, including the California Highway Patrol, sheriff's departments in Orange and Sacramento counties, and police departments in Alameda, Union City, Pleasanton, Livermore, San Rafael, Novato and Sacramento.

Peek into future

A company PowerPoint presentation about its products, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, contains a section on the company's "near-future" that includes a fusion of public records, license-plate data and facial recognition. Other technology will help law enforcement find cars using a "probabilistic assessment" of a vehicle's location based on historical data and public records, according to the presentation.

Another PowerPoint slide prepared for Texas law enforcement shows how a combined data program could work. It would pull mug shots from a Department of Motor Vehicles database and notify law enforcement if "a vehicle is associated with someone with a known criminal history." The slide also describes "facial images embedded into" the license-plate record.

Amy Widdowson, a Vigilant spokeswoman, said the slides were of a prototype program that did not actually include facial recognition technology.

As for specific references to merging license-plate data with facial recognition and public records, Widdowson said the slide "is merely showing that law enforcement can combine data from public records with LPR (license-plate reader) data to reduce their search area for a suspect."

Privacy fears

Privacy advocates said combining historical plate-reader data with public records and facial recognition technology runs contrary to law enforcement's argument that license plates are not considered personally identifying information.

Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Los Angeles Police Department to obtain information about their collection and use of license-plate data, said Vigilant's plans could represent a major change in the technology.

By combining the location data from license-plate readers with public records such as court files and property records - as well as photographs of people from criminal or DMV databases - into one search tool that could be used with facial recognition software, license-plate readers could move into uncharted territory.

A plate reader could tag a passing car and the names of people associated with the vehicle and keep a log of where that person traveled.

"When you're combining data from multiple sources, it becomes incredibly revealing," Lynch said.

S.F. lawsuit

For her part, Green's lawsuit against the San Francisco Police Department is heading to trial after the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court's decision to dismiss her claim. At the time of the incident, police used license-plate readers manufactured by PIPS Technology, not technology from Vigilant Solutions.

San Francisco officials declined to comment on the pending litigation.

Green's attorney, Michael Haddad, said the incident took a toll on her. "It was extremely terrifying, and Denise ended up having to miss a couple weeks of work and get counseling afterward," he said.

Haddad said license-plate readers have an error rate as high as 8 percent. "There's some acknowledgment by the manufacturers," he said, "that there's a significant percentage of the time that they're wrong."