ACLU warns of mass tracking of US drivers by government spycams
US drivers are being tracked to an unprecedented extent thanks to a system fattened by federal grant money and spurred by the rush to market private automobile data, according to a report by the ACLU.
After analyzing 26,000 pages of documents from police departments spread across the USA, along with information about private companies, the American Civil Liberties Union has produced a report highlighting the large amounts of data public and private companies are storing on drivers, and the poor retention policies that go along with it.
The You Are Being Tracked report was released on Wednesday, and argues that "the implementation of automatic license plate readers poses serious privacy and other civil liberties threats". Automatic license plate readers have proliferated across the US due to a fall in the cost of underlying storage and interception technology, and some $50 million dollars in federal grant money distributed to under-funded law enforcement departments that otherwise couldn't afford it.
