After nearly a week of searching for a suspect in the hit-and-run death of an 81-year-old St. Helena, California, woman this summer, police found and arrested a man with the help of license plate reading cameras that registered him near the scene.
The police department used information from Flock’s automatic license plate reading camera system, which monitors and records license plate data in a cloud-based database. The company makes cameras, drones, audio detection, and software tools used by cities, law enforcement, and school systems with the goal of crime detection and faster solve times.
Using a license plate number to find a suspect isn’t new to crime solving, but finding that license plate in an autonomously-captured and organized data log, rather than by humans looking through security footage or searching in-person, is more novel.
It’s part of a growing system of “Internet of Things” (IoT) technologies — networks of physical objects that are connected to the internet and can exchange data with other devices or software. These IoT devices are often called “smart cities” devices, because they’re used by states and cities that are aiming to improve services, including making their roads safer and more efficient for drivers and pedestrians.
People on the roads are likely used to red light and security cameras at intersections, but advancements in cloud technology and artificial intelligence allow transit agencies and cities to collect far more data than ever before, and to use that data in more strategic ways.
But with increased monitoring, data collection and analysis comes ethical and privacy concerns.
There’s never been a problem with checking a license plate to see if a car is stolen or otherwise wanted, said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said. But when that license plate data are retained for an unknown amount of time and for an undetermined purpose, they could infringe on privacy and civil liberties.
“As this technology becomes increasingly denser in our communities, and at a certain point you have like three of them on every block, it becomes the equivalent to tracking everybody by using GPS,” Stanley said. “That raises not only policy issues, but also constitutional issues.”
The residents of St. Helena, in Napa Valley, likely aren’t upset that the technology was used for its intended purpose to help find the perpetrator of a crime, Hari Balakrishnan, a computer science and AI researcher and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of the August arrest.
“I might posit that we should move from what is the data being collected to what is being done with the data?” he said. “By whom and for what purpose?”
What are smart cities technologies?
In recent years, cities have begun to use hardware, like cameras and sensors, that record and sort information into databases with the help of AI. They usually do so with a specific objective in mind, like tracking the safety of a pedestrian crosswalk, monitoring speeding in an area, or to help traffic flow better through intersections during rush hour.
The hardware devices can signal to the city’s software to take action, like turn the light green, or record data in a stored area for people to analyze later on. Many of these interconnected systems are called intelligent transportation systems (ITS), said Nathan Kautz, a senior transportation safety engineer based in Tampa, Florida. Some can even detect traffic accidents and trigger an EMS response, and then help that EMS vehicle get to the scene of an accident faster by greenlighting it through traffic signals.
Florida’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan from 2021 identifies monitoring speed as a proven way to reduce traffic fatalities, and outlines that it will use ITS infrastructure as a countermeasure. The technical systems allow for monitoring without the use of police officers stationed throughout the roadways.
“It allows you to get coverage of that corridor and try to keep speeds at an appropriate level when nobody’s watching, to improve the safety and the survivability at outcomes for say, like for a pedestrian or bicyclist,” Kautz said.
Balakrishnan has been working in IoT and mobile computing for the last two decades and founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics about 15 years ago. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company gathers data from IoT devices like smartphones, connected vehicles, dash cameras, and third-party devices to detect driving behavior.
The company works with insurance and auto companies, as well as rideshare companies, to promote safe driving by using data obtained by driving behavior to assess risk, safety, claims, and driver improvement programs. Balakrishnan said the company estimates it has helped prevent about 80,000 crashes and about 40,000 serious injuries.
Another form of technology some cities are using is LiDAR, which uses lasers to bounce light off of objects to measure distance. It’s the foundational technology of Ouster, which makes hardware and software and works with cities on traffic concerns as well as with clients in the security, industrial, and automotive industries. The traffic sensors are posted at about 250 intersections in California, Florida, Tennessee, Utah, and Colorado.
The technology’s lasers bounce heat off objects and reflect distance back to the sensor. It uses those data to create 3-D anonymous models of the people and vehicles at street level, the Bay Area company’s VP of Smart Infrastructure, Itai Dadon, said.
“You understand depth, you understand scale, you understand position in space. You don’t have to infer all that like we do with cameras,” he said. “And on top of that, you can do it without invading the privacy of either your employees or the community that you’re servicing.”
Ethical and data privacy concerns
There are primarily two ways that IoT technologies work — infrastructure or mobile devices. And the factor of whether a user has control over the device is where privacy considerations come into play, Balakrishnan said.
Cambridge Mobile Telematics’ device, which users voluntarily place in their car and communicate with other IoT devices to track their driving, is an example of a mobile device. It’s similar to a wearable fitness tracker that collects data as you work out or sleep, Balakrishnan said.
“You’re using it for yourself. And I don’t think anyone reasonably would apply the word ‘surveillance’ to that,” Balakrishnan said. “If you don’t want it, don’t use it.”
But IoT devices embedded into infrastructure, like cameras or sensors on stop light poles, inductive loops under pavement that detect vehicles at stoplights, or automatic license plate readers, are not something that people opt into.
“If somebody puts a bunch of cameras on the road and they say that this is for measuring your speeding and sending tickets, okay, there’s warnings, and that’s the law, or that’s the way the rules are,” Balakrishnan said. “But now, if somebody took that data and used it for purposes that was not explicitly intended, then one could say, ‘Hey, there’s some surveillance happening.’”
The use of these connected cameras and traffic monitoring systems are being applied across the country on a case-by-case basis. Some states, like Maine, prohibit traffic cameras from enforcing traffic violations except on toll roads. Others, like Missouri, allow them by law, but the state supreme court ruled it is unconstitutional to issue traffic violations unless the state can prove the identity of the driver at the time of citation.
It often comes down to the county or municipality, since there is no federal legislation on data privacy in traffic enforcement.
“All cities and municipalities are very different and have slightly different problems, but they all want, at the end of the day … the benefits for the community,” Dadon said. “However, sometimes they lack the understanding of what the technology can actually do, and by wanting to do good, sometimes run a little bit fast.”
That was the case in San Diego, starting in 2016. The city installed 3,200 “smart streetlights” to deter crime and to log data from license plate readers, but citizens grew concerned with privacy, saying the city wouldn’t tell them how the data could be used, and they would be shared with third parties, CBS8 reported last year.
The police department eventually began using the cameras as a crime-fighting surveillance tool, which led community members to allege that the program was violating their privacy and targeting people of color. The city ended the program shortly after also due to budget concerns, but it began installing cameras again in 2024.
A perceived benefit of camera traffic surveillance is that fewer traffic stops or direct interactions with police officers could decrease the number of arrests made of people of color. But the technology hasn’t proven to eliminate racial factors. A ProPublica investigation in 2022 found that traffic surveillance programs in New York, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Chicago still ticketed people of color and people from lower-income neighborhoods more than white drivers.
And the systems can’t work toward the benefit of the community if they’re not being used properly. A woman in Detroit is suing the police department after she was wrongfully arrested for a drive-by shooting in 2023 when police incorrectly used data from the city’s automatic license plate reader.
Instead of searching for a reported license plate number in the system, police searched for any plates that belong to white Dodge Chargers and found one on a camera two miles from the crime scene. The woman they arrested had been recorded driving just blocks from her home and had no connection to the crime other than the similar make and model of her car.
IoT and privacy legislation
Because there’s no federal direction on data privacy of smart cities systems, it will continue to be up to cities, or even municipalities, to make their own rules, said Daniel Weitzner, founding director of the Internet Policy Research Initiative at MIT.
Cities often work with private technology companies to establish these intelligent transportation systems, and have a procurement bid process. It’s why Balakrishnan said cities or states looking to install these technologies have to clearly outline what data are being collected and who has access to the information.
Balakrishnan and Dadon warn that cities looking to enter contracts with smart city systems companies have to ask the right questions about how and where their data are being stored. There have not been any major cases of data collected by these traffic cameras ending up in third-party systems, they say, but there’s always the possibility that it could if companies and their public sector counterparts are not following the same standards for data storage.
The way we assess surveillance and privacy in the digital age is “under stress,” Weitzner said. Evolving technologies have made lawmakers have to constantly assess what data privacy rights look like at any given time. Supreme Court decisions, like Carpenter v. United States, which refined what access to location data from cellphones are allowed without a search warrant, and Riley v. California, which ruled that the warrantless search and seizure of the digital contents of a cellphone during an arrest is unconstitutional, show how this field has evolved.
“What all this translates into is that digital information can be subject to a lot more uses and can be a lot more revealing than the kind of equivalent … analog information, or information that’s available on paper,” Weitzner said.
So, it may not be concerning to collect license plate data for speeding or traffic violations, but using those data across the board for any other purpose, for an unlimited amount of time, is a lot more sensitive, he added. And until Congress passes a standardization law for the industry, states will have to determine what works best for them, and what actions may be over the line.
“The underlying conundrum that we have is just that you can string together a lot of innocent, innocuous pieces of data,” Weitzner said. “And get something very valuable and very revealing.”
–Paige Gross, Florida Phoenix
Dennis C Rathsam says
How smart was George Orwell……
Deborah Coffey says
A little bit of George Orwell’s “1984?” Technology…a lot of good and a lot of bad.
Dennis says
I lived in Lancaster Pa for years. Lancaster is one of the most watched cities in America, at least it used to be. If you don’t break the law, no worries.
Pig Farmer says
Any new technology/capability WILL eventually be misused by whoever controls it. It is human nature. There is no way the police are going to be handed a tool and not use all of it’s capabilities, legal or not. Stingrays are a perfect example. They won’t admit when they are being used as court cases are often dismissed when it revealed they were used to identify a suspect.
me says
If it means keeping people safe bring it on.
Dave thomas says
Every Flagler camera on every traffic light gets routed to the FSCO real time crime center. The center also gets feeds from local citizens & DOT. And these also flow into a system called FUSUS. School board, & the other PD’s are routed into FUSUS as well. In fact with a little box anyone’s cameras can be tied in. Look it up.
Add in the plate scanners that are strategically deployed around the county & the RTCC can track people anywhere in the county.
Skibum says
Great!!! This technology is vital to helping law enforcement in today’s world. With local, state and federal law enforcement agencies continuing to have to do more with less money and resources allocated to them but with the same or higher expectations from the public, it would amount to official negligence to not seek ways to enhance the ability of many agencies to be proactive as well as keeping up with the cleverness of many criminals out there who spend their entire existence trying to find new ways to victimize innocent people. Many schools throughout the nation now have the ability to link their camera systems directly to their local law enforcement agencies so in the event of an active shooter, law enforcement has the ability to potentially view and track a person with a gun in order to see how many suspects there are and their location in real time. Would you be willing to deny school children and education staff of this critical, proactive technology if you were a parent concerned about the ongoing threat of school shootings? Many homeowners have voluntarily allowed law enforcement agencies to link to their Ring doorbell or other similar outdoor security cameras to help solve crimes in neighborhoods across America. Would you be willing to deny our sheriff’s office the ability to use this critical technology to solve violent crimes and arrest suspects that happened to target your particular street or neighborhood? Many of the Flagler County Sheriff’s patrol cars have license plate readers and the ability to quickly identify and locate stolen vehicles. If your car was stolen from your driveway, would you deny law enforcement the use of the latest technology to find your stolen car and stop the thief in the process of trying to permanently depriving you of your property? For myself, I will never understand the uproar of those who railed against the red light cameras that Palm Coast HAD on some of our major intersection traffic light poles, which allowed the ticketing of idiot drivers who ran red lights or committed other traffic violations that resulted in collisions at those intersections, but they are gone because enough people apparently thought “big brother” was watching everyone with an evil eye and just couldn’t understand the fact that red light cameras helped keep us all safe by reminding everyone of this technology and giving consequences to those boneheads who needed the addition of a traffic citation to improve their driving deficiencies. Practically everywhere we go in most cities today, public safety camera systems are in use by law enforcement, allowing them to identify criminals and solve crimes, even where victims and witnesses are reluctant or out and out refuse to cooperate with an investigation for various reasons. There will always be those who somehow harbor this unfounded belief that law enforcement has nothing better to do than “spy” on people for no reason, but the truth is that surveillance cameras in public spaces including our streets and highway, although monitored, s are usually not closely scrutinized or action taken until their is a complaint, a crime committed, or a risk to public safety, and individuals need not be alarmed or worried about this invaluable crime fighting technology that is in use to keep all of us SAFE!
Pogo says
@All this and heaven too
Sherry says
Simply Brilliant! Thank You Pogo!
Endless dark money says
Check out survellied on hbo. Snowden proved years ago the us is mass data collecting on everyone against your rights .no one has been held accountable .Current privacy laws were written before the internet existed.
R.S. says
I have no problems with using cameras to enforce traffic rules such as speeding, wreckless and aggressive driving, and endangering pedestrians. If I have permitted another person to drive my car, I should issue a permssion slip to the person for the use of my car and for insurance regulations anyway. If it’s a matter of different drivers within the same family, one would simply identify the driver at that time. Because such a violation involves the safety of the community as a whole, I’d not think that these issues would involve 5th amendment rights: safety on the roads involves us all; it’s not an accusation merely. At the same time, the onus is on the voter to see to it that governments are elected that know their limitations. If one elects someone who vows to prosecute all who do not like him/her, the electorate is the author to such calamities, not the camera.
Laurel says
Our children and grandchildren are already set up to accept this lack of privacy. They have “bios” posted on many sites, putting out info on their photos, birthdays, likes, dislikes, love relationships and so on. Bios on Tik Tok. Bios on Facebook. Bios in the Metaverse. Good luck with that! Government administrations love to use fear of crime to push their agendas, even though crime has dropped and the justification is not warranted. If we let it, we will be like China when it comes to data and monitoring citizens. Privacy will soon be a novelty. Makes it really easy for the Big Brother types to control people.
We know that we can use the express lane without a transponder as the camera will get a picture of our license plate, it can then be looked up, and we are sent a bill. A couple years ago, I got such a bill. It showed my car’s plate, stated the highway it was on, showed the amount I was to pay, had the State of Texas Highway Department logo, and looked all official. Problem was, I have not been in Texas in nearly fifty years! Neither had my car been there. It was a hoax. Needless to say, I did not pay.
Point being, all this wonderful AI data collection, meant to make our lives safer and better, can ever so easily be exploited, and will be. Just more scams, more money stolen, more internet crime, more people surveilled who shouldn’t be and more problems that may simply override the benefits. But it will sold as better for us.
Sherry says
Right On Laurel! I read 1984 . . . “I” guard my privacy diligently! Those who naively say things like, “just don’t break the law” need to think beyond their noses, and beyond this current moment. “The Laws” are determined by “mostly” corrupt politicians (Democrats as well as Republicans) who really don’t give a damn about you. What they do care about is the accumulation of their own personal wealth and power. If you are not currently wealthy/powerful you will continue to be at a greater and greater disadvantage as your rights and privacy are slowly stripped away. Really “Think” about it! For example, actively read, and think about the repercussions of the stories published by Flaglerlive all the time.
Consider the current situation where trump will soon be president. He has said that he will seek retribution against all those who opposed him in any way. Our corrupt Supreme Court has already signaled that they will continue to give him all the legal power to do almost anything he wants. Consider the possibility, that trump, or other powerful persons, could use surveillance technology to track their personal enemies in order to “catch them” doing ANYTHING that could be twisted into something unlawful. At a minimum, that person would need to spend thousands of dollars to hire the people needed to prove their innocence/simply defend them in court. Do you have the financial ability to defend yourself against a vengeful politician or other powerful person today?
Now, look to the future and multiply that scenario times ten and you will come close to comprehending just how “vital” your privacy is in controlling your own life. Maybe, we should all care much more about giving away control of our lives to those who are most certainly NOT SAINTS!
Laurel says
Yes, a couple people commented above that if you don’t break the law, no problem, and if it makes us safe bring it on. Right out of George Orwell’s “1984!” I would hope they read it soon, so that they can understand how those statements are used.
Trump’s buddy, Musk, has stated he will use his money to go after the Republicans who voted against Trump’s budget shutdown. Soon, the most powerful man in the world will have the richest man in the world as his enforcer. No wonder the politicians, and tech giants, are puckering up.
Skibum says
Laurel, while you make an excellent point about all of the exploitation of minors on social media by big tech and social media giants and the burgeoning development of AI, it is the lack of parental guidance and oversight over their children that is causing a lot of the safety issues young people face. Parents should be helping protect their kids, not enabling them and allowing their kids’ phones, computers and social media platforms to be today’s babysitters, then putting the blame on others when the natural curiosity and innocent instincts of minors ends up putting those impressionable young ones in danger. When I go into a restaurant and see another table with children who have their heads down, engrossed in their smart phones, and then look to the opposite side of that table only to see their parents with their cell phones out, not paying any attention or talking among themselves but instead in their own little world while at the table, I know there is little to no oversight at home either, and the kids end up emulating their parents’ own bad habits in a potentially dangerous world that is the internet. What could possibly go wrong when those same kids are behind closed doors in their bedrooms or when the parents are at work? It is not government’s use of traffic and public surveillance cameras that are the danger to children, but that same technology can and does help find and prosecute the criminals who are more than willing to target and take advantage of our nation’s children when parents are either ignorant of the dangers or are negligent and fail to properly monitor kids’ online activities in their own homes.
R.S. says
There are exceptions to the “selfish politicians” rule. I only mention Jimmy Carter and Bernie Sanders here, although my own bias also would select most progressives here. If we vote the way we do, we get what we’ve asked for.