“Here
in my car, I feel safest of all
I
can lock all my doors. It’s the only way to live, in cars.”
-
“Cars”, Gary Numan 1979
You may feel
that your car is your last private refuge in this busy world. But there’s someone along for the ride: Big Brother.
And you’d be surprised what he knows about you, thanks to modern technology.
CELL PHONES:
Your cell phone is constantly transmitting its location, and services
like Google Dashboard’s
location history can show exactly where you were at any date in time. Don’t want to be tracked? Turn off your cellphone.
E-ZPASS: Even when you are nowhere near a toll booth,
E-ZPass detectors can monitor
your location. Want to stay anonymous? Keep your E-ZPass
wrapped in aluminum foil in your glove box.
HIGHWAY CAMERAS:
The extensive network of traffic cameras on our interstates and parkways
is used mostly to monitor accidents. But
State Police can also watch individual vehicles. The cameras are even available to the public online. But state law specifically forbids using these
cameras to write speeding tickets.
LICENSE PLATE READERS:
This is the newest and most powerful tracking tech, as I saw in a
ride-along a few years ago with my local PD.
These cameras mounted on police cars can scan
up to 1800 license plates a minute as cars drive by at speed.
As the plate
number is recognized, it is transmitted to a national crime computer and
compared against a list of wanted vehicles and scofflaws.
 |
| Officer reviews LPR alert in his car |
If it gets a “hit” a dashboard screen in the
cop car flashes a red signal and beeps, detailing the plate number and infraction. In just one hour driving through my town we
made stops for outstanding warrants, lack of insurance and stolen plates. (Some towns also use LPR’s for parking
enforcement in train station parking lots, forgoing the need for hang-tags or
stickers.)
While this may
lead to very efficient law enforcement, LPR’s also have a potentially darker
side: the data about plate number, location
and time can be stored forever.
Faced with a string
of unsolved burglaries, Darien police used their LPR to track every car
entering the targeted neighborhood and looked for patterns of out-of-town cars
driving through at the time of the burglaries and made an arrest.
But the ACLU
is concerned about how long cops can store this data and how it should be used. They laud the CT State Police policy of only
storing data for 90 days.
In the early
days of LPRs in 2012 an ACLU staffer filed an FOI request for his car’s plate
number and found it had been tracked four times by 10 police departments in a
database that had 3 million scan records.
So enjoy your
car. But realize that none of us has any privacy.
