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Over the past two years, we’ve detailed the rise of license plate readers and the potential ways that these databases can be abused. While law enforcement has portrayed license plate readers as a vital means of tracking criminals and reducing crime, the technology can create profound conflicts of interest between a police force and the general population.

The EFF has a new report on one such conflict in Texas, where a license plate scanner company named Vigilant Technologies has offered Texas police “budget neutral” (meaning free) access to both the company’s license plate readers and its database of information.

In 2015, Texas passed a law that allowed the police to install credit and debit card readers directly in their cars. The idea was that troopers could take immediate payment for unpaid fines while they had the individual stopped, rather than going through the process of setting a court date or making an arrest. In theory, this is a solid concept, and multiple criminal justice reform groups supported it.

In practice, things aren’t so rosy. Vigilant, Guadalupe County, and the city of Kyle cut a deal in which Vigilant provided both readers and database access and the city government told Vigilant which citizens owed money to the government.

Those pulled over for violations of a capias fine (say, a traffic ticket)have a choice: They can be arrested on the spot, or they can pay the fine immediately, with an additional 25% processing fee tacked on. That fee goes straight to Vigilant. The EFF summarizes it nicely:

[T]he driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant’s payment website.

In 2014, NPR published an in-depth investigation into how American municipalities are effectively criminalizing poverty by reinstating policies that turn jails into de facto debtors’ prisons. Poor people aren’t the only people who might owe unpaid debts, but they’re disproportionately likely to be unable to pay them off when stopped by a police officer. Tacking on a 25% “processing” fee on top of whatever the fine is imposes a further burden on people.

It’s all well and good to argue that giving people the option to pay fines immediately helps them avoid stress, hassle, and the cost of childcare. It’s another thing altogether when the fees are inflated and used to threaten individuals with immediate arrest or loss of vehicle if they don’t have cash in the bank to pay a fine right then.

The EFF also reports that Guadalupe County has signed an agreement with Vigilant that allows the company to dispatch its own contractors to collect on outstanding capias fines, without going through the police at all.

Finally, the agreement that Vigilant signed with the City of Kyle give it full authority to keep the data it collected on individuals “for as long as it has commercial value.” The corporation retains all such data, even if the city cancels its contract.

Kyle and Guadalupe County are just two of Vigilant’s 3,000 law-enforcement agency customers across the country, but the issues raised here go deeper than police actions. Vigilant boasts that it currently possesses more than 2.2 billion snapshots of license plate photos, and adds another 80 million every month. These images are geotagged and monetized in what amounts to a mass surveillance operation, and Vigilant’s parent company, Digital Recognition Services, openly boasts that: “Fortune 1000 financial institutions rely on DRN solutions to drive decisions about loan origination, servicing, and collections. Insurance providers turn DRN’s solutions and data into insights to mitigate risk and investigate fraud. And, our vehicle location data transforms automotive recovery processes, substantially increasing portfolio returns.”

In other words, your vehicle (and where it ends up stopped) is now a potential factor in your insurance rates, your loan approval process, and your credit evaluation. Once upon a time, a traffic ticket was a minor administrative matter between you and the local government. Now it’s part of a corporate database and available for monetization.