License plate readers posted at both entrances to an upscale Aurora neighborhood snapped pictures of passing cars Wednesday, recording the type, color and license plate number of each vehicle and inputting that information into a database.

Such technology used to be relegated to law enforcement. But these cameras were purchased by the local homeowner association in January after a few burglaries of cars and a home in the neighborhood. Red signs near the cameras warn passersby of “24/7 Video Recording.”

“It’s going to keep us safer,” said Richard Warshaw, president of the Bel-Aire Estates Owners Association.

Forget doorbell cams — some Denver-area neighborhoods are now equipping their streets with cameras that will photograph your car and scan your license plate. Such license plate readers stand ever vigilant in 10 neighborhoods in Denver, Lone Tree, Sheridan and Aurora, according to Flock Safety, the company that sells them.

The readers are the most recent iteration of home security technology that have proliferated over the past few years as such equipment becomes more affordable, even as concerns about privacy and data breaches mount. Even in the hands of police, the technology has been controversial for its ability to quickly collect and store vast amounts of information.

“We can’t begin to fathom how fast we’re moving to a ‘Star Trek’ world,” said Albert Gidari, consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

Warshaw said the five-person board of the homeowner association decided to add the three cameras and use money from the neighborhood’s dues to pay for it. The entire 75-home neighborhood did not vote on the decision, but Warshaw said he hadn’t heard any negative feedback.

Warshaw, who has lived in the neighborhood since 2005, admitted that one home burglary in 15 years is not exactly a rash of crime. But the license plate readers make the residents feel safer.

“Is it going to stop crime?” Warshaw said. “No. But it’s a layer of protection.”

Perception vs. reality

The expansion of such devices nationwide does not match crime rates, which have dropped precipitously since the 1990s. Across the country and in Colorado, people were twice as likely to be victims of property crimes like burglary and theft in 1993 as they were in 2017, FBI crime statistics show.

But peoples’ perceptions of crime often don’t align with reality, said Andrea Borrego, an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Public opinion about crime is often based more on media representations and anecdotal evidence than statistics, she said.

“The people who are most fearful of crime are those least likely to be affected by it,” Borrego said.

The growth of private security technology like license plate readers is inevitable, said Garrett Langley, Flock Safety founder and CEO. The demand for his product shows that people want to feel safer, he said.

“Crime, whether or not it’s up, it sure feels like it,” he said.

The company charges about $2,000 a year for the installation, maintenance and data storage for each solar-powered camera. Most of the company’s customers are homeowner associations or neighborhood groups that pay for the cameras collectively, Langley said. The motion-activated cameras record 24/7 and can capture the license plate number, vehicle type and color of any vehicle traveling up to 75 mph and up to 75 feet away, according to the company. The cameras also capture pictures of pedestrians and cyclists.

Images of the vehicle are then uploaded to the company’s Amazon Web Services cloud server and the data collected from the image becomes part of a searchable database. The HOA members with access can then search the database by time or vehicle description. They can also give police access to the footage if a crime is reported.

Flock Safety promises its customers it will not access the images without permission and will not sell the data collected to a third party. Those who live in the neighborhood can register their license plate with the system and the computer will automatically erase any images of those vehicles. All the data stored on the cloud are encrypted, and all data are deleted after 30 days, according to the company.

Each neighborhood is responsible for creating its own policies about who can access the images, which are owned by the customers, not the company.

In Warshaw’s neighborhood, only the five members of the homeowner association board can access the photos and database, and will only do so if a crime has been reported to police. They will then give police access to the footage for the time period during which the crime is suspected to have occurred. So far, the neighborhood hasn’t had to access the images.

Police departments have used license plate readers for years. The Denver Police Department has used mobile readers mounted in police vehicles since 2015 and last year installed a license plate reader at the intersection of Federal Boulevard and Sixth Avenue.

Denver police Division Chief Ron Thomas said he had not heard of citizen-owned license plate readers. But the more common doorbell cameras have proven very valuable in police investigations, he said.

“Cases are solved like that every day,” he said.

Not if, but when

Only recently has license plate reader technology been accessible to private citizens, said Steve Beaty, a professor at MSU Denver who studies data security. Although homeowners have used security cameras for years, the number of such devices skyrocketed starting in 2015, he said.

Beaty laughed when asked what he thought of Flock Safety’s safeguards meant to protect privacy. Beaty said all people should assume that any personal data collected from them will eventually be accessed without their knowledge. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when, he said.

“I assume these things are going to start showing up in divorce proceedings,” he said.

While an individual piece of data — like a license plate number — may not be useful to a marketer or hacker, that information becomes a piece of a larger profile created from data accessed from other places. In aggregate, entities can start to know your neighborhood, your habits and your friends, he said.

The cameras themselves aren’t necessarily a violation of privacy, said Gidari, the Stanford privacy expert. They are collecting images of people traveling in public, where people implicitly give consent to being seen and photographed, he said.

“We have to move beyond fear of the collection and focus more on the conduct: Who has access to it? And what can they do it with?” he said.

Beaty believes that, eventually, people will decide that giving up privacy for security is no longer a beneficial transaction. At some point, the breach of privacy becomes its own security risk, he said.

“It’s essentially become a slippery slope,” he said.

Warshaw, the HOA president, said he received a call Tuesday from someone interested in buying the house across the street from him. The prospective buyer asked about the license plate readers.

“He was happy they were there,” Warshaw said.