EFF: License Plate Scanner Deal Turns Texas Cops Into Debt Collectors (eff.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sounding the alarm about a deal between Texas law enforcement agencies and Vigilant Solutions — a company that provides vehicle surveillance tech. The deal will give Texas police access to a bunch of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and access to the company's data and analytic tools. For free. How is Vigilant making money? "The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil's bargain: get arrested, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant. In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant's payment website." Vigilant also gets to keep the data collected on citizens while the ALPRs are in use.

Comments

Re:Fools think this is horrible.

[StillAnonymous]

If the police end up caring about the public, then they can't be trusted to act in the interests of those in power when they're told to go bash skulls at a food riot in progress.

That just won't do. To prevent that, animosity must be generated between the police and the people. Psychopathic goons who want to lay a beat-down must be given hiring preference. Unjust court rulings must let police off the hook for their wrongs and overly punish regular folks for even the slightest perceived infractions.

That's how you get the people busy fighting among themselves and ignoring the real problems in our society: bankers/financiers, crooked politicians, and billionaire globalist industrialists.

Re:Fools think this is horrible.

[JaredOfEuropa]

And since we now have face recognition, everyone who displays their face in plain view have no expectation of privacy either. If you don't want to be tracked, it's a burqa for you... or you can just keep walking with your head up your arse, I suppose.

Over here, privacy laws make a clear distinction between data being available, and the acts of collecting, processing and sharing that data. Each of those acts is strictly regulated, and the fact that your license plate is always in full view doesn't mean that everyone has the right to track your whereabouts 24/7. In this case, the idea behind this setup (catching outstanding fines with a license plate reader) does not clash with principles of good privacy, but the implementation does: a private company having access to that list of deadbeats, for instance. I would expect the police to (be ordered to) demand a system that is under their full control, with no 3rd parties having access to any of the data.