LOS ANGELES -- The growth of photo databases run by private firms that are fed by cameras that take pictures of vehicle license plates on public streets has attracted the attention of a California lawmaker worried about privacy.
The digital photos, automatically snapped by cameras mounted on cars and street poles and then tagged with time and location, are transmitted to databases running on remote computer servers.
Police can then search those databases to track the past whereabouts of drivers -- a process that law enforcement officials call an invaluable tool for tracking down stolen cars and catching fugitives.
But such databases are also being built by private firms, which can sell access to anyone willing to pay, such as lenders, repossession workers and private investigators. That is raising worries among privacy advocates and lawmakers, who say the fast-growing industry is not only ripe for conflicts of interest but also invasive.
"What they're doing crosses the line," said California state Sen. Jerry Hill, who is pushing legislation to rein in the industry in his state.
While Hill agrees that license-plate data can aid law enforcement, he's worried that partnerships between police and for-profit data firms could result in police doing the bidding of insurance companies and repossession firms.
Hill's legislation would ban public agencies from sharing data they collect with private entities, prohibit license-plate scanners from going onto private property without consent and make it easier for privacy lawsuits to be filed against data collectors.
To demonstrate the power of the databases, Hill hired a private detective to track his wife. Rather than tailing her, the detective paid for access to license data that showed Hill's wife parked at a Sacramento gym more than 100 miles from their home.
In another case, a San Leandro, Calif., man filed a public records request and learned that his cars were photographed more than 100 times, including one image that showed his daughters in the driveway.
Hill's legislation faces an uphill battle. A similar bill in California died amid intense lobbying by law enforcement officials and the industry in 2012.
In Utah, lawmakers backed off legislation restricting commercial collection of license-plate data after being sued by one of the leading license-data collectors, Vigilant Solutions in Livermore, Calif.
Like other data firms, Vigilant claims free-speech rights to take photographs in public.
However, privacy activists warn that tracking cars over time can reveal where people live, work, worship and who they associate with. A sudden change in someone's routine could hint at a breakup or an affair.
Vigilant's website downplays those concerns, describing license-plate data as anonymous and little more than a series of letters and numbers. The data, the site says, track cars, not their drivers, and does not reveal with whom a person associates.
But the website for the firm's affiliated company, which caters to repossession workers, strikes a different tone.
"Owners are typically within 1,000 feet of the vehicle, so find the vehicle and you find the customer," says the site of Digital Recognition Network. "Quickly and efficiently pinpoint the most likely addresses from among the limitless possibilities returned by various data services, friends, associates, relatives, employers."
The industry is growing rapidly. A 2010 study showed a third of large police departments using plate readers. In 2012, the most recent data available, a survey found more than 70 percent of the nation's police departments had the scanners, including the Little Rock Police Department, which has one mounted on a vehicle.
Vigilant in particular has seen its appeal among law enforcement officers grow because it can offer police departments access to a trove of more than 2 billion scans, maintained by an affiliated company, Digital Recognition Network. That database is fed by cameras attached to vehicles driven by repossession agents roving the nation's roadways.
The two companies have 160 employees. Vigilant reports having more than 3,500 law enforcement clients that either use the company's cameras or access its data. Digital Recognition Network has more than 250 customers.
A Vigilant representative estimated that the entire industry brings in as much as $500 million a year.
Along with Vigilant, some of the other companies providing license-plate-scanning technology include Motorola, PlateSmart and PIPS Technology. Their law enforcement clients generally point to high-profile cases the technology helped solve.
Last month, police used license-plate data to end a month-long hunt for a man suspected of randomly firing at cars on Kansas City, Mo., highways. A woman who thought she was being followed reported the plate number. Police plugged that into their system and quickly had the car's past locations. Within a day, a license-plate scanner passed the car and got a hit.
Last year, Vigilant Solutions offered police in Tempe, Ariz., license-plate scanners for free. But there was a catch, according to a copy of the offer obtained by The Times.
To keep the freebies, the Tempe department had to go after at least 25 outstanding "Vigilant provided" warrants each month. In general, such arrangements are paid for by private collection companies, which profit by going after warrants that result from people failing to pay municipal fines, said Brian Shockley, a vice president at Vigilant.
In the document, Vigilant assured the Tempe department that the offer was not an attempt to "unduly influence" its police work. But the company also warned that the free cameras would be taken away if the Police Department failed to meet its monthly quota.
"We look at a lot of different, creative ways to serve our clients," Shockley said. "Budgets and grant dollars are somewhat limited these days."
Shockley, who declined to answer questions about the Tempe proposal, said no agencies are currently working under this framework.
He also declined to identify law enforcement departments that have hired his company.
A Tempe police official told The Times that his agency opted out of the unusual program. But Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the offer was concerning.
"We have no way of tracking what's going on in the private realm," she said. "All we have is the publicity statements these companies put out." Some law enforcement agencies have denied public records requests for license-plate data, and private data collectors are not subject to such records requests.
"A lot of times," Lynch said, "they even have a clause that says law enforcement agencies aren't allowed to talk about their products without talking to the company first."
Monday Business on 05/26/2014