Require Police to Get a Warrant to Search ALPR Data
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling for warrant requirements before police can search automated license plate reader databases, arguing that ALPRs amount to mass surveillance by logging the location and movement of nearly every driver. The EFF supports scrapping these systems entirely but sees a warrant requirement as a necessary harm-reduction measure where they already exist.
Why this matters: Every time you drive past an ALPR camera, your plate, location, and time get logged. Do that enough times and you have a detailed map of your life. Police can currently search that data in many places without showing probable cause to a judge. That is the problem. A warrant does not make mass surveillance acceptable, as the EFF is careful to say. But it does put a human check between a database full of everyone's movements and a search that targets you specifically. Without it, the default is that your driving history is always available.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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