ACLU: Do Automatic License Plate Readers violate privacy under the 4th Amendment
aclu.orgAlso related: Police Have Reportedly Used License Plate Readers to Stalk Romantic Interests at Least 18 Times in Recent Years (https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...)
While Carpenter v. United States (2018) somewhat changed the rules regarding the "purchase" of third-party data in the context of an investigation, it seems like the ALPRs do not violate the 4th amendment the same way that the decision in Carpenter decided.
Since ALPRs are effectively fixed in a geographic place with gaps and AFAIK do have relatively low retention periods (I need to double check this), they don't offer the same "whole person movement" data that a phone would when described in Carpenter.
Will be interesting to see how this goes, and I'm sure ALPR density may play a part in it, but for now I don't think it violates someone's privacy under the 4th amendment.
This debate also ties heavily into one around the surveillance network created via camera networks like Ring.
A lower resolution tracking is still tracking though. Spatial resolution is low/fixed doesn’t change the fact that I was tagged using the personally identifiable plate and my movements were tracked across the town. A banal traffic monitoring system watching for cars is different than systematically monitoring each individual’s movement even though it’s not very very precise.
If this were an app - Location sharing by default has been set to 25 miles, I’d prefer it to be OFF.
> A lower resolution tracking is still tracking though. Spatial resolution is low/fixed doesn’t change the fact that I was tagged using the personally identifiable plate and my movements were tracked across the town.
You're not wrong that it's still tracking. Though, whether it's tracking or not isn't really the thing up for debate here.
In my head it's:
A) Whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy from a person or company when driving your car with a personally identifiable plate on a public street.
B) Is it your data that is being searched or is it the data of the company who owns the ALPR? Is it a violation of your rights for that data to be searched?
The decision in Carpenter is extremely narrow and doesn't cover things like cameras or non-targeted tower dumps.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
It's also similar to the ever growing network of toll road cameras and bridge/highway cameras that capture an image of each car + driver's face.
Isn’t tracking part of “search”? wouldn’t you need a warrant or court order to request my cellphone gps data? How is this tracking/search not contradictory to unreasonable search portion of the 4th amendment. The action of tracking and touching flock itself is violation of 4th amendment.
No, it's not. You are not protected from a private company that owns ALPRs as part of the 4th amendment.
The government purchasing data from 3rd parties (the third-party doctrine) doesn't violate your 4th amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. You voluntarily gave the data to a 3rd party and the 3rd party voluntarily sold that data to the government.
The carve out is really only for phone GPS data (cell tower connection logs) as specified in Carpenter v. United States.
So just like you're not protected from AT&T selling your call logs to the government, you're not protected from Flock selling access to their images of your car (at this time).
That's a great point regarding other camera networks like Ring. I'm not sure which ones bother me more.. probably Ring but it's close. Seems like we can't escape being surveilled 24/7 everywhere we go. :(
The “low-retention period” can be trivially extended, but likely not in your favor.