License-plate information should be public - mcall.com

License-plate information should be public - mcall.com:

Dan HartzellThe Road Warrior

8:54 p.m. EST, January 17, 2013

Q: Some time ago a car was parked for several weeks in line with our driveway on a narrow street. Though parked legally as far as we knew, this posed a hazard, and safer places were available nearby. I called the Allentown police to ask if they could identify the owner from the license plate, so that I could call the person to ask that the car be moved. The police were very nice, and said they'd send an officer to see if the car was parked legally, but added that they are not allowed to provide information obtained from 'running the plate.' I think that's a silly provision in light of all the 'right to know' legislation. License plates are issued by the state, and there is no reason to keep registrants' names secret. It costs money to dispatch police for a service I could provide as a common courtesy. Assuming this policy is state law, whom should I contact to suggest a change?

— Arthur Weinrach, Allentown

 A: In a culture where "road rage" is a familiar phrase, there's good reason to shield driver's license and vehicle registration information from ready public access. It would be too easy for anyone to identify and find a driver to retaliate for a violation of motoring etiquette, real or imagined. Even apart from roadway disputes, personal information from PennDOT could be used to help track down domestic violence or other targets.

When we discussed this by phone recently, you agreed that it's reasonable to protect this kind of information, Arthur. You also said your parked car problem turned out to be temporary and was amicably resolved.

In addition to regulations in Pennsylvania and other states, federal law strictly controls the use of private information contained in motor vehicle records. The federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act was prompted by the 1989 killing of television star Rebecca Schaeffer. The man who killed the actress got her address from a private investigator who'd obtained the information from California license records.

The law prohibits states and their employees from releasing names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and photographs from motor vehicle records without the subject's consent. When South Carolina challenged the law as a violation of states' rights, the U.S. Supreme Court not only upheld it, but did so in a rare unanimous decision in January 2000.

What fired up my engine regarding this issue was a recent report on the NPR radio program "On the Media" in which Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter Eric Roper discussed his August story revealing that city police used automatic license plate recognition technology to scan nearly 5 million plates during the first seven months of 2012, including Roper's personal plate seven times. The records indicated when he drove to work one morning, when he went home in the evening, even when and where he parked several times late at night at a friend's house.

How did Roper know all this? He filed a request for his own plate's information under Minnesota's open-records law, and police provided it. Roper was given only the times and locations of his license being captured by the scanners, and no personal information — name, address, or anything else. In Minnesota, you need to request data on specific license numbers, and will obtain times and locations at which the camera "saw" those plates. You can't simply ask, "Where has Jane Doe's car been for the past three days?"

Still, someone could discover the residence of an ex-spouse, for example, simply by knowing the person's car routinely is parked at a specific address. The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy advocates are concerned, chiefly because police gather information on all motorists, not just those legitimately suspected of criminal activity, and because there are few controls on how long the data can be stored. "While we don't know the full extent of this problem, we know that responsible deletion of data is the exception, not the norm," the ACLU wrote in a July editorial.

"The places you go say a lot about who you are," an ACLU staff attorney added on the organization's website. "If the government knows where you shop, where you worship, who you visit, and where you go to the doctor, it can put together a picture of your entire life." Maine and New Hampshire have imposed time limits on data storage, and the ACLU urges other states to map a similar course.

In Pennsylvania, police are forbidden from releasing personal information from PennDOT's database or from criminal records, regardless of how the data are collected, said state police spokesman Trooper Adam Reed. "We have to sign privacy documents … [indicating] that we can't disclose information" other than for legitimate law enforcement purposes, whether from a license plate reader or from running a driver's record at a routine traffic stop, Reed said.

Twenty-five license plate readers on loan from the Pennsylvania Auto Theft Prevention Authority were installed on state police cars across Pennsylvania, including two from the Bethlehem barracks, from 2009 until early last year, when they were returned to the authority for use at the local level, state police Lt. Jeffrey Hopkins said. The results were unimpressive. For example, of 3.3 million plates scanned in 2011, only 30 stolen vehicles were identified. Hopkins said state police have no plans to acquire readers of their own. Regarding the ACLU's concern about lengthy information retention, state police deleted the data at the end of every work shift, he said.

The systems also are used for parking enforcement, including in Allentown. The city Parking Authority's cameras are tailored specifically to recognize parked vehicles that have overstayed their welcome in limited-time zones. A camera on a roving authority vehicle records a parked car's license and location, and the time, and if the vehicle exceeds the time limit as detected in a subsequent pass by the authority car, the computer alerts the driver and a citation is written. The system replaces the old procedure of marking the tires with chalk.

However, the authority's license readers are not linked to police or PennDOT databases, Executive Director Tamara Dolan said. The officers who write tickets don't even know the identities of the vehicle owners. Fewer than 10 of the authority's 38 employees have access to vehicle registration information, and they sign security breach waivers and are fully informed of their duty to protect private information, Dolan said: "We're really strict on protecting the privacy of vehicle owners and their registration information."

Road Warrior appears Mondays and Fridays, and the Warrior blogs at mcall.com. Email questions about roadways, traffic and transportation, with your name and the municipality where you live, to hartzell@mcall.com, or write to Road Warrior, Box 1260, Allentown, PA 18105-1260.

Copyright © 2013, The Morning Call

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License plate data: business opportunity or public safety risk? | Minnesota Public Radio News

License plate data: business opportunity or public safety risk? | Minnesota Public Radio News:

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Academics and entrepreneurs nationwide have received copies of a massive database that the Minneapolis police department uses to track the location of cars. Where some see business or research opportunities, the city sees a public safety risk.

The data come from the city's network of automatic license plate readers — cameras that record the locations of hundreds of thousands of cars every month.

Minneapolis has received at least 100 requests for data from its license plate scanners over the last five months, ever since the Star Tribune first reported on the existence of the data. Most requests came from people who wanted to know where the scanners had spotted an individual license plate. More than a third came from one man, Alex Peterson, who repossesses cars for a living.

"I see a license plate hit in this neighborhood, and I do work on the Internet and find out they have a relative who lives in that neighborhood and find it at that address," Peterson said. "There's a lot of different ways I can use the information."

Minnesota law makes all data collected by the government public, unless it is specifically classified otherwise. Minneapolis dutifully turns over the information to anyone who asks.

"It became clear to us that this was creating a real risk to public safety."

- Susan Segal, attorney for city of Minneapolis

But earlier in December, the city abruptly changed its approach and asked the state to issue an order rendering the data private for the next two years while it lobbies the Legislature to change the law.

"It became clear to us that this was creating a real risk to public safety," said Susan Segal, city attorney.

Segal said the license plate readers are designed to help police find criminals and stolen cars. In the wrong hands, the data they collect could be used to commit crimes.

"Victims of domestic abuse, for example, don't want their batterers to know where they're living or where they may be working," Segal said.

The city is also concerned about the increasing amounts of data being requested.

In addition to inquiries about specific license plates, Minneapolis also received numerous requests for the entire database. Earlier this month, it released a file containing some 2.1 million records covering a three month period.

Nine people received the database. One of them was Mark Pitts of Rogers, Minn., who is finishing up a master's degree in statistics.

"And so I thought it would be an interesting data set for my master's project, and it turned about to be a very interesting dataset as you know," Pitts said.

Eight of the license plate scanners are attached to police cars. Pitts said the scanners don't just record the locations of nearby vehicles; they also record the movements of the police. (Read from Pitts' blog about the analysis)

"And so you can literally see everywhere they went. I can tell you when they stopped for lunch. I can tell you when they met at the hospital," Pitts said. "There's a lot more information about their activities and movements in this data then there are about any single individual."

That's why Pitts supports making the data private. But some of the other people who have examined the data disagree.

Arthur D'Antonio, 25, is a California-based Web developer who has requested similar data from other cities around the country. He is exploring whether the data have commercial applications.

"I personally believe that the data shouldn't be being stored on innocent people at all. But I also believe that if it is, we're paying for that," D'Antonio said. "And so anybody should be able to use it for whatever legal purpose they want to use it for."

D'Antonio hasn't figured out exactly how to make money using the data, but the fact that automobile repossession companies have been using it, suggests one possibility, he said.

"Is there any way that we could have made it so that that guy could have obtained that data, quicker, more efficiently, maybe even on the go?" D'Antonio said. "That makes his business that much more successful. He can maybe hire more people. If there's opportunity, I think everybody should be looking to seize it."

But researchers and entrepreneurs looking for opportunities in the license plate scanner databases may have missed their chance, at least for now. A recently-issued administrative order classifies the data as private for at least the next three months. It applies to Minneapolis and any other Minnesota cities that collect this data. And the Legislature will likely consider whether to make the data private permanently.

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