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The system is also being used to help police. Each morning, Calgary police provide the parking authority with a list of licence plate numbers associated with stolen vehicles.

At the end of each day, the parking authority will run that list of stolen plates against all plates that were scanned that day, plus all plates scanned the previous 29 days. If there’s a match, police will be notified. The city says about eight to 10 stolen vehicles are recovered monthly.

On occasion — about three times a year — police go to the parking authority with a request to search for a specific licence plate. For these special requests, the parking authority will search its entire database of scanned plates, which goes back seven years.

“The police, for very good reason, don’t give us a lot of detail. In fact, the times I’ve been involved, they haven’t told us what the crime is. They kind of keep it under wraps,” said Miles Dyck, the city’s parking enforcement manager.

Even if police have a reason to sift through the stored data, the fact that the data consists of plate information belonging to people who are innocent of wrongdoing is troublesome, Parsons said.

“I don’t think people go around their daily lives with the expectation that my movements are going to be monitored because at some point in the future I may be of interest to the police.”

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The City of Guelph, whose bylaw enforcers also use licence plate readers, takes a different stance. If police want to see if the city’s licence plate readers have scanned a particular plate in the past, they have to file a formal request or come with a warrant, said Doug Godfrey, the city’s manager of bylaw compliance. No such request has been made, he said.