An editorial in the L. A. Times includes:
It’s easy to say that no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy when driving on the streets or parking in a public place. But changing technology — especially the digitizing of license plate photographs and an almost endless storage capacity — has dramatically widened the window through which police can track an individual’s comings and goings.
Like GPS technology, which allows police to track the movements of suspects through their cars and telephones, the proliferation of license plate scanners demonstrates the need to adapt traditional notions of privacy to new and invasive technologies. The American Civil Liberties Union has proposed several recommendations to protect privacy: Police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred before examining collected license plate data; citizens should be able to find out if data about their license plate are contained in a database; license plate data should be deleted after a short period to avoid fishing expeditions; and law enforcement shouldn’t share such data with third parties that don’t adhere to these protections.
Read more on L.A. Times.
Thanks to Joe Cadillic for this link.