WHAT THEY KNOW
New Tracking Frontier: Your License Plates
By JULIA ANGWIN and JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES October 13, 2012
For more than two years, the police in San Leandro, Calif., photographed Mike Katz-Lacabe's Toyota Tercel almost weekly. They have shots of it cruising along Estudillo Avenue near the library, parked at his friend's house and near a coffee shop he likes. In one case, they snapped a photo of him and his two daughters getting out of a car in his driveway.
Mr. Katz-Lacabe isn't charged with, or suspected of, any crime. Local police are tracking his vehicle automatically, using cameras mounted on a patrol car that record every nearby vehicle-license plate, time and location.
"Why are they keeping all this data?" says Mr. Katz-Lacabe, who obtained the photos of his car through a public-records request. "I've done nothing wrong."
Until recently it was far too expensive for police to track the locations of innocent people such as Mr. Katz-Lacabe. But as surveillance technologies decline in cost and grow in sophistication, police are rapidly adopting them. Private companies are joining, too. At least two start-up companies, both founded by "repo men"-specialists in repossessing cars or property from deadbeats-are currently deploying camera-equipped cars nationwide to photograph people's license plates, hoping to profit from the data they collect.
The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying people's everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the default rather than the exception. Cellphone-location data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored in vast databases.
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Privacy, like a digital car key, is very easy to lose and very expensive to get back. My son and his friends, all twenty-somethings, have grown up in a digital online world: they have participated in what they thought were free online games and harmless online bulletin boards and cute online chat groups. They are starting to realize that they entrusted commercial profiteers with their privacy, and that it will not be returned to them.
Bill Horne Moderator