Automated License Plate Reader systems are ubiquitous in California. 80% or more of CA cities and counties stick these high-speed cameras on streetlights or on police vehicles to snap up the license plate numbers of all passing cars. These images with the time and location they were recorded are mass-uploaded to databases in the cloud, where hundreds and sometimes thousands of law enforcement agencies can query location information on any car, sometimes going back as long as five years.
In 2020, the California State Auditor took a look at this program and said it is a privacy threat to Californians and that scans not of interest in any criminal matter should be purged as soon as possible. But 3 years after the auditor's recommendation, nothing has happened.
It's time for that to change.
Since the audit report, bans and restrictions on abortion and gender-affirming care have greatly increased the interest of out of state law agencies in the whereabouts of visiting cars in California. We can't have sheriffs from Texas, Oklahoma and Idaho poking about in ALPR cloud databases.
AB 1463, authored by Long Beach assemblyman Josh Lowenthal and sponsored by Oakland Privacy would do 3 things:
1) Ban the sharing of California license plate scans with out of state law enforcement agencies without a court order or a warrant issued by a California court.
2) Strengthen auditing requirements for ALPR programs.
3) Limit cloud database retention of scans not associated with any criminal matter to 30 days.
In a free and democratic society, or one that makes such claims, there is no reason for the government to keep a vast database of our movements through public space. We know that a collection of ALPR scans can expose where people live and where they work. In 2014, Ars Technica, after getting a trove of ALPR scans from the Oakland Police Department, correctly guessed the home address of an Oakland council person. In 2015, a private investigator given the license plate number of a state senator's wife, tracked her to a local gym where she was working out by analyzing a year's worth of her vehicle travel patterns.
Geolocation data is sensitive data.
Tell the California Assembly to protect it by voting yes on AB 1463.