Initially conceived for traffic management and crime fighting, automatic license plate readers in the US have become, with the help of artificial intelligence, a mass location tracking infrastructure. Without a federal law similar to Europe’s GDPR, the collected data circulates without transparency and is already being reused for purposes far beyond the initial mandate – from deportations to reproductive health investigations, writes Live Science.
For decades, cars have dictated urban planning in the United States.
Few could have predicted that one day these would also function as surveillance nodes.
In thousands of cities across the USA, automatic license plate readers have been installed at major intersections, on bridges, and at highway exits.
These camera-based systems capture the license plate data of passing vehicles, along with images of the vehicle and time stamps. More recently, these systems use artificial intelligence to create a vast database, which can be queried and integrated with other data repositories of law enforcement agencies.
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