In California, a Failed Fight for Car Owners’ Privacy Rights

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In California, a Failed Fight for Car Owners’ Privacy Rights

May 14th, 2017

Awake Goy

Source: Car and Driver

California state law permits car owners to cover their legally parked cars to protect them against weather and incidental damage. It’d be easy to assume that, because cars can be covered in their entirety, it would also be perfectly okay for motorists to keep only their license plates covered on those same legally parked vehicles. That’s not necessarily the case: Another law prohibits obscuring the license plates of parked cars in California.

State lawmakers considered a bill to resolve ambiguities between the two laws this week. It failed in a subcommittee vote on Tuesday, May 9, but backers say a similar bill will likely resurface in the future because the broader issues aren’t going away. Superficially, this may seem like a minor quibble but the bill is symptomatic of an underlying tug between privacy rights and security. Privacy advocates want to ensure that Californians can cover their license plates and cars to prevent them from being photographed by automated license-plate readers (LPRs). That’s the thing in the photo above, the object that looks like WALL-E’s head sitting on the rear decklid of a police car. Whether mobile or stationary (typically mounted near speed-reading cameras or surveillance cameras in parking lots, as in the image below), these plate readers are operated by both law-enforcement agencies and for-profit private companies.

License-plate-reading technology harvests location data from thousands of license plates in a matter of hours. Over time, this location data can paint a detailed portrait of a car owner’s personal life, including, for a few examples, information about where they travel, what doctors they see, or which religious services they attend.

In the case of LPRs operated by private companies, the compiled data is offered for sale to other private businesses, including insurance companies, debt collectors, and lenders. Information collected by law-enforcement agencies may be considered public information in some cases. In both public and private spheres, there are often inconsistent rules that govern data storage and retention. In many cases, there are no rules at all.

“At least 14 states” do have laws that address license-plate readers and the retention of data, including California, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“This data puts a wide variety of individuals at risk,” wrote Dave Maass, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital realm. He wrote a letter on behalf of the organization in support of the proposed bill, which failed in a 6-5 vote in the California state senate’s Transportation and Housing Committee.