Poll: Worried Police—and Others—Are Tracking Your Car?
Star-Tribune report suggests civilian strangers could track your car.
To most Southwest Minneapolis residents who pass through downtown, the Minneapolis Police Department's portable closed-circuit television cameras are hardly a strange sight. But according to the Star-Tribune, those cameras can also read, identify, and record your license plate numbers.
Along with special plate-reading cameras that are starting to be mounted on the department's squad cars, the department is feeding a large database of information about where cars move in the city. The information is kept on police servers for around a year, the Star-Tribune reports, and could—in theory—be used by police to track your car and travel patterns around the city. The plate number is public data, but the plate owner's name is not, the paper reports.
The fact that Minneapolis police keep the data for a year worries privacy experts. But does it worry you? Should license plate data be as trackable as your internet browsing history?
Sue
4:40 pm on Sunday, August 19, 2012
What is the purpose of this? It sounds to me that there is an underlying reason for this that they are not revealing. It just doesn't make sense to me and seems like a waste of money.
Todd Johnson
3:11 pm on Saturday, August 25, 2012
So they are able to know who is travelling when and where. This will be great information for the police state to have when the war games they are playing this week turn to an actual internment of the people of Minneapolis.