Calgary resident Linda McKay-Panos doesn’t venture downtown often, but a city database knows where and when she parked her car during 10 visits over the past four years.
Each day, parking enforcement officers drive the city’s streets in cars equipped with cameras designed to scan licence plates and identify parking scofflaws. Even if no violation has been committed, the city still holds on to data showing the time and location the vehicle was spotted, as well as a photo of the vehicle.
As use of licence-plate scanning technology grows in Canada among bylaw enforcement agencies and police departments there is no consistency as to how long such data is retained or who it’s shared with.
While some agencies scrub their systems of so-called “non-hit” data daily, others hold on to that data for several years or indefinitely. Some agencies share the data they collect with police investigators, while others require a warrant.
Privacy advocates are worried.
In the U.S., some private companies are using the technology to amass giant databases of historical vehicle sightings and sharing that information with police, private investigators, insurance companies, banks and others.
The technology is becoming a “mass surveillance” tool and demands better oversight, said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab specializing in technology and privacy issues.
“It doesn’t matter that there are positive intentions behind this. It’s a surveillance system,” he said.
The post ‘You are being tracked’: How cities use licence-plate scanners to create vast databases of vehicle sightings appeared first on Trunews:.
from Trunews: http://ift.tt/1sht4CK
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment