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 w...










