Repo Businesses Building Huge Surveillance Network

People in the business of
repossessing cars are increasingly also in the business of
collecting and selling the sensitive data of bystanders.

The Boston Globe
reports on “Manny Sousa’s repo company” in Massachusetts, which
uses automatic license plate readers to collect roughly 8,000
plates everyday. Sousa and at least nine others in the state send
their data to Digital Recognition Network in Texas, which “claims
to collect plate scans of 40 percent of all US vehicles
annually.”

Of course, the job of repossessing unpaid cars is legitimate if
not popular. But, the vast majority of plates collected are of no
interest to repo men. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
explains that “license plate data allows the data gatherer,” or
whoever buys the information from them, “to track all
movement in and out of an area; specifically target
certain neighborhoods or organizations; or
place political activists on hot lists so that their
movements trigger alerts.”

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has previously suggested
that license plate readers “raise privacy issues similar to those
raised by GPS tracking,” and that  despite the conventional
view that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in
public,” court cases have affirmed that they do.

The American Civil Liberties Union told the Globe that
regulating the use of license plate readers by businesses is the
answer. Yet, attempting to legislate away private action would be
ineffective. Government can
never keep pace with technological developments. What appears
to be a well-intentioned regulation today could prove to be a
costly prohibition with unintended consequences tomorrow.
Legislators from the local to federal level could, however, push
for budgetary limitations and other restrictions on law
enforcement’s data collection abilities that would disincentivize
the industry.

After all, government entities create a big chunk of the demand
for companies like Digital Recognition Network. Police forces
around the country has contracts with them, and as
Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille
noted recently, the Department of Homeland Security already

pays billions to implement this type of technology and briefly
considered creating a national database that would “give new life,
purpose, and resources” to such businesses.