Private Companies Gathering Plate Data Are Selling Access To People's Movements For $20 A Search

from the lojacking-humans dept

License plate readers are everywhere. Their existence is predicated on the assumption that traveling on public roads strips drivers of their privacy. To a certain extent this is true. But automation allows government agencies to reconstruct peoples' lives and movements by simply typing in a plate number and accessing the billions of image/location data records stored by ALPR manufacturers like Vigilant.

But it's not just a government thing. The new market for plate readers is residential neighborhoods, with purchases being made by home owners associations and others who feel they have a right to know who's traveling in and out of "their" neighborhoods.

Prior to this, though, ALPRs were already being utilized extensively by private entities. Insurance companies and repossession firms have been using plate readers for years, using them to track down vehicles after missed payments or those suspected of insurance fraud. Unlike the databases compiled by law enforcement agencies, these private databases can be accessed by nearly anyone for any reason.

That's exactly what Motherboard did. It found someone willing to offer up their license plate as a lab rat to see how much data was being harvested by a repo company's plate readers and ran a search.

Armed with just a car's plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted. I gave the private investigator, who offered to demonstrate the capability, a plate of someone who consented to be tracked. It was a match. The results popped up: dozens of sightings, spanning years. The system could see photos of the car parked outside the owner's house; the car in another state as its driver went to visit family; and the car parked in other spots in the owner's city. Each was tagged with the time and GPS coordinates of the car. Some showed the car's location as recently as a few weeks before. In addition to photos of the vehicle itself, the tool displayed the car's accurate location on an easy to understand, Google Maps-style interface.

Unlike government databases, there are no rules protecting citizens from misuse or limiting long-term storage of plate photos. All that's preventing abuse is the limited language of each company's terms of service -- something these companies don't seem to spend too much time enforcing. Digital Recognition Network's (DRN) offering is "crowdsourced" from thousands of cameras mounted on hundreds of repo men's vehicles. It's a persistent, long-term database of vehicle movements controlled by a single company -- one that law enforcement also has access to, as if government agencies needed any more access to plate data.

It's also surprisingly cheap. $15,000 gets drivers a four-camera setup and access to the DRN database. Searches go for $20 per and paying $70 for a search provides the searcher with live updates when a searched plate is snagged by a plate reader. Customers love it. So do repossession outfits, whose drivers earn bonuses for racking up plate photos. And DRN loves the data it collects, which it packages for sale through other programs, like one specifically marketed to private investigators.

The potential for abuse is real. The Motherboard report notes that members of a closed Facebook group for private investigators was filled with messages asking others to run plates for them. DRN's official line on abuse prevention is pretty much a jargon-filled shrug.

Notably, DRN does not immediately ban someone for abusing the service, according to the contract. It reads that if DRN determines or suspects that the user has used the data for personal or non-business purposes, "Licensor [DRN] shall notify Licensee in writing of the alleged breach and give Licensee an opportunity to cure any curable breaches within 30 days of Licensee's receipt of such notice; thereafter Licensor may take immediate action, including, without limitation, terminating the delivery of, and the license to use, the Licensed Data."

There may be no "expectation of privacy" in driving on public streets. But I think most Americans would consider their privacy violated by the existence of a product that reconstructs their lives for the low, low price of $20 a search. Given that these companies are also selling access to law enforcement, they may yet find a way to trip over the Fourth Amendment. But until a company like DRN does, it's just another company doing what so many tech companies do best: harvest and sell data.

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Filed Under: alpr, bounty hunters, license plates, location data, privacy