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Public Records Request Returns 4.6M License Plate Scans From Oakland PD
schwit1 points out a report from Ars Technica on how they used a public records request to acquire an entire License Plate Reader dataset from the Oakland Police Department. The dataset includes 4.6 million total reads from 1.1 million unique plates. They built a custom visualization tool to demonstrate how this data could be abused. "For instance, during a meeting with an Oakland city council member, Ars was able to accurately guess the block where the council member lives after less than a minute of research using his license plate data. Similarly, while "working" at an Oakland bar mere blocks from Oakland police headquarters, we ran a plate from a car parked in the bar's driveway through our tool. The plate had been read 48 times over two years in two small clusters: one near the bar and a much larger cluster 24 blocks north in a residential area—likely the driver's home." Though the Oakland PD has periodically deleted data to free up space — the 4.6 million records were strewn across 18 different Excel spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of lines each — there is no formal retention limit.
This is bulk surveillance data, you could not follow 1.1 million people around individually, but the police clearly are logging the location and time where they go via automatic number plate readers.
Imagine the sort of data Uber God mode offers. That one 'an employee' said was used to track a journalist critical of them, and he was promptly sacked.
Who is with whom, who is having an affair with who, where their kids go to school, if they see a source of a story, or investigate something, all that location data is there in Ubers hands. Metadata smetadata.
Even if the police make this data private, the general population will jump in to make this (and most) data such as this freely available.
Actually, there are private companies that already do this. They drive around streets and parking lots scanning people's license plates. Then they aggregate that information on a national level to resell to other companies. This data is really handy for car/truck repos, private detectives, and stalker exes.
And the information they have dwarves any information the police department has themselves. It's such a new area, it's not regulated yet.
Probably would not be useful to exonerate as it would only say where your car was, not where you were. For some reason, circumstantial incriminating evidence is is often more likely to be accepted than exculpatory evidence. Of course, it should be the other way around. A good defense lawyer flips this back in your favor.