Automatic license plate readers used to be a nightmare for privacy activist for over a decade, but last year Dobbs . High Court decided to create an even darker vision: ability of countries that support the right to choose support countries that are anti-abortion seek to prosecute people seeking medical care.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report showing that 71 law enforcement agencies in 22 California counties shared ALPR data with law enforcement in places like Texas, Idaho, Oklahoma and other states where not only is abortion illegal, but leave the state to seek abortion Caring can be a crime. ALPR can capture thousands of license plates every hour, tracking everywhere a driver goes. These cameras will even record your car parked in a private driveway. If someone else sees your car, the police can track it.
While the police and the EFF both say they are not aware of any cases where license plate data from California was used to prosecute anti-choice law violations, you probably shouldn’t wait for someone’s rights. violated when you can act now. Indeed, sharing the data appears to have violated California’s own privacy laws, according to Sacramento Bee (by Yahoo! News). Police, including Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper, had a perfectly reasonable response to the report: posting through it.
“Law enforcement agencies often use information from License Plate Readers (LPRs) to investigate serious crimes, such as murder, child abduction, human trafficking, and transnational drug trafficking. state border,” the twitter account said.
It is not clear who sent the tweets from the official account.
It goes on to say that organizations like the EFF “lied that law enforcement sharing this information was an attempt to violate people’s legal rights. These false claims are intentional and part of a broader agenda to promote lawlessness and hold criminals accountable.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment by the deadline. On Wednesday, after this story was published, Cooper put on twitter accused the EFF of “protecting child molesters, fentanyl traffickers, rapists and murderers.”
Sharing ALRP data between state lines is an important law enforcement tool that less than half of California’s 58 counties participate in. One California law enforcement agency even stopped sharing with agencies across the states after it was named in the EFF report. And no one is saying they want the drug dealers and murderers to go free, just that California police follow an eight-year-old law that protects people’s privacy.
There are still no strong protections around data collection and use in most countries. California leads the game, with a number of laws protecting citizens’ rights, including the 2019 Act California Consumer Privacy Act.
