Privacy Advocates Sue Virginia Police Over Data From Automatic License Plate Scanners

By itself, your license plate doesn’t say much except in what state, month, and year you registered your car. But start tracking where and when that license plate goes, and you’ve suddenly got a whole huge pile of personal data about all the comings and goings in someone’s life. We’ve reported beforethat license plate scanning by public and private entities is both widespread and unregulated. Now, the ACLU is suing police in one state to get them to stop.

The ACLU of Virginia filed suit this week, on the behalf of one Fairfax County resident, against the Fairfax County Police department for unlawfully storing massive amounts of license plate data collected using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).

The resident, the ACLU explains, learned that his license plate had been scanned twice in one year, and that the data had been saved in a database even though neither he nor his car are involved in any kind of police investigation. This, the suit claims, violates Virginia law.

That law itself has been the subject of much discussion in the commonwealth this year. During their last session, Virginia’s state legislature passed a bill that would have permitted law-enforcement agencies to keep using the optical readers, but with slimitations on how the data could be used, and for how long it could be kept:

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