Can police scan license plates

Where to watch. RT Shop. RT News App. Question more live. A little-noticed surveillance technology equips police vehicles with infrared cameras that can record car license plate numbers then log the data for tracking outstanding warrants, suspended licenses and stolen vehicles.

You can share this story on social media:. Follow RT on. Top stories. Unvaccinated father stripped of visiting rights by judge. You have no expectation of privacy while out in public. Courts have regularly held that police officers are allowed to randomly type license tags into their computer as they pass by. These systems are just a version of that on steroids.

Additional local police departments are setting up these systems every day, often paid for by federal grants or homeland security. And all that data will sit… somewhere. No doubt this will be a significant improvement to public safety in many cases. But someone should be asking what we are giving up in the process, and what if any restrictions exist on the use of this data to check up on ordinary citizens.

Recently, the Federal Eight Circuit court of Appeals found that private license plate data collection companies do not have unlimited First Amendment rights to photograph everything and scan and save the data.

States like Arkansas in this case and Utah previously have tried to pass restrictions on data collection. The Arkansas law stands, and only allows data collection from government entities.

The Plaintiff in the case, Digital Recognition Network Inc Vigilant Solutions was hoping to get its own data collected by private towing companies or other venues, in order to sell the data to other private entities — repo firms, car insurance investigators, or anyone else who would pay.

And California just passed a new law requiring ALPR operators to safeguard the data and personal privacy of the individuals and cars scanned in data sweeps. With the data defined as personal, any security breach of personal data would trigger notification requirements to be disclosed to the individuals.

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