Lawsuit Against Automatic License Plate Reader May Proceed, Judge Says

Privacy is a nice concept but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

A federal judge ruled this week that a lawsuit against Norfolk, Virginia can move forward.

The city currently has 172 license plate readers and plans to add 65 more cameras around the city.

The cameras record all vehicles within 150 feet of any camera and that data is used to create a fingerprint of each vehicle, which is uploaded to a cloud database of all vehicles and where they have been.

The fingerprint is stored for at least 30 days, but could be stored forever; the vendor claims it does not control data retention.

The system and data is managed by a company that collects that data nationally named Flock. Flock has been involved in privacy lawsuits nationwide.

The Norfolk police chief said that the cameras make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere”.

Flock’s system works well even if a car owner puts a tinted plastic cover over their license plate because it tracks make, model, color and identifying characteristics like bumper stickers in addition to the license plate, making the system more invasive. So for those folks who think they are stopping themselves from being tracked – not so much.

The Virginia federal judge said that the plaintiffs “sufficiently alleged” the cameras violate their fourth amendment rights protecting against unreasonable search and seizures by the government. The judge cited a 2018 Supreme Court case that held that a warrant is needed to use mobile device location data to monitor individuals’ movements.

If this lawsuit is successful it will basically destroy Flock’s business model.

The way the system works, any Flock customer, many of whom are local Homeowners’ Associations (HOAs), for example, can ask the Flock system where any license plate has been.

The HOAs likely don’t need a warrant because they are not the government. Potentially they could violate state privacy laws, but in most states because HOAs are so small, they are exempt from the privacy laws.

At least right now, some courts have held that you don’t have an expectation of privacy in your license plate since it is designed by the government to identify you. This case is about prolonged surveillance, not car identification, so we will see where this goes. It is likely to make it up to the Supremes at some point.

Credit: Forbes and The Record

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