License Plate Readers Expand Across Colorado, Raising Privacy Concerns

By: Shaun Boyd | CBS Colorado

Police across Colorado say they make communities safer, but privacy experts have a different opinion about license plate readers.

While license plate readers have been around for decades, the cameras now capture, not just license plates, but vast troves of information. That information is fed into a national database, where it can be combined with other surveillance to develop detailed travel patterns of millions of people as they go to a political rally, or an abortion clinic, a house of worship, or a gay bar. The cameras are so prolific that it’s difficult to avoid them in many cities.

Boulder software engineer Will Freeman is the first to begin mapping them.

A year ago, he didn’t even know what license plate readers looked like, let alone where they were located. Today, he can tell you where to find more than 34,000 of them.   

Freeman created a website that allows anyone to upload a camera location. Deflock.me is a reference to Flock Safety, a company with tens of thousands of cameras across the country, which contracts with police, businesses, colleges, and even HOAs.

“I wanted people to know what’s around them and what they do because even calling them a license plate reader, it’s not really true,” says Freeman. “They do way more than that.”

 A Flock video presentation explains how the cameras take still or video images of every vehicle that drives by, use artificial intelligence to document small details like a logo or bumper sticker, and then enter the information in a national database that can be integrated with drone video to catalogue a driver’s movements for weeks, months, or years. There are even algorithms to flag suspicious travel patterns. The cameras also record audio and can track not only vehicles but also people. 

According to Flock’s patent, the technology can classify individuals by race, gender, height, weight, and even clothing.

Freeman says criminals aren’t the only ones who should be worried, “Do you trust everyone who has access to them? Do you even know who all has access to them?”  

Flock says 5,000 police departments nationwide use its cameras, and those agencies control who has access to their data. But the company admits it was giving Border Patrol access until recently.

Freeman found that the Boulder Police Department was sharing with everyone on Flock’s national network. An open records request showed outside agencies had conducted nearly 424,000 searches of Boulder’s cameras in one month.

It’s unclear what they were searching for. Many of them simply said “investigation” if anything. Boulder now says it only shares in-state.  

CBS Colorado filed open records requests with three dozen law enforcement agencies and higher ed institutions in Colorado to find out who they were sharing with. Most of them refused to provide that data, including Castle Rock, Commerce City, Firestone, Fort Collins, Erie, Edgewater, Brighton, Lone Tree, Thornton, Vail, Boulder County, Douglas County, Larimer County, Mesa County, and Weld County. 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT CBS COLORADO