If you were watching KSAT-12 News tonight in San Antonio, or anywhere else online, you may have seen a story about an easier way for the San Antonio Police Department to find and collect fines during warrant roundups. San Antonio wants to partner up with a California-based company called Vigilant Solutions.
Vigilant Solutions offers a product known as Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR), or simply LPR. According to their website, it's a tool that "ultimately saves lives." The website goes on to say that this product is "the most comprehensive offering available, with over tens of thousands of users around the world, and thousands of success stories."
The company collects your data to share with credentialed law enforcement personnel, and is readily accessible and easy to use. What they don't tell you is that once your information is collected, that information is sold, and you can kiss your privacy goodbye.
According to The Atlantic website, Vigilant Solutions takes "photos of cars and trucks with its vast network of unobtrusive cameras. It retains location data of each of those pictures, and sells it." It has taken 2.2 billion license-plate photos to date, capturing and storing these images. Once their device have captured your information, your whereabouts at any given moment are stored permanently and sold to police departments using your tax dollars.
The City of Kyle, just south of Austin, almost partnered up with Vigilant Solutions, but in a 6-1 vote last week during a city council meeting, they decided to rescind their agreement. The city would have paid Vigilant Solutions a 25-percent surcharge to help police identify drivers with outstanding warrants, and collect their fines onsite, according to The Texas Tribune. Kyle officials voted to join the program in January.
Kyle City Council Member, Daphne Tenorio, told the Tribune she was comfortable with the idea when they first voted. She later had doubts when she realized the plan would hurt the poor most.
"It was too much Big Brother," she said to the Texas Tribune. "And there was no way that they could honestly say that the information was safe. And in this day of technology, with hackers nothing is safe. I wouldn't want my information being given and shared with other people."
The Wall Street Journal reported that "during the past five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than $50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Georgia, population 23,000—for automated license-plate recognition systems." It also quoted one critic, California state Senator Joe Simitian, asking: “Should a cop who thinks you're cute have access to your daily movements for the past 10 years without your knowledge or consent? I think the answer to that question should be ‘no.’”
As of now, Vigilant Solutions has no sure safeguard in place to protect any of the data they collect. Fewer than a dozen communities in Texas are currently participating in this pilot program.
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