Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

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.

It doesn’t matter that there are positive intentions behind this. It’s a surveillance system

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.

Use by parking enforcers

McKay-Panos, executive director of the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre, allowed Postmedia News to file a freedom-of-information request for her parking records.

The records mailed to McKay-Panos showed the date, time and address or parkade where she parked. One time, she was visiting her doctor, she recalled. Another time it was the courthouse. Yet another time she was delivering a presentation on privacy.

“That’s a lot of information about me. I don’t understand why they would need to keep it,” she said. “The more you keep, the more likely the wrong person gets their hands on it.”

Calgary Parking Authority officials explained that six vehicles scan an average of 20,000 licence plates daily. At the end of each day, the scanned plates are checked against a database to confirm payment was made. (The city does not use metered parking, only pay-by-licence plate parking).

Ted Rhodes, Calgary HeraldLinda McKay-Panos is upset that her personal driving information has been tracked by the Calgary Parking Authority through the use of it's ParkPlus system.

The system is also being used to help police. Each morning, Calgary police provide the parking authority with a list of licence plate numbers associated with stolen vehicles.

At the end of each day, the parking authority will run that list of stolen plates against all plates that were scanned that day, plus all plates scanned the previous 29 days. If there’s a match, police will be notified. The city says about eight to 10 stolen vehicles are recovered monthly.

On occasion — about three times a year — police go to the parking authority with a request to search for a specific licence plate. For these special requests, the parking authority will search its entire database of scanned plates, which goes back seven years.

“The police, for very good reason, don’t give us a lot of detail. In fact, the times I’ve been involved, they haven’t told us what the crime is. They kind of keep it under wraps,” said Miles Dyck, the city’s parking enforcement manager.

Even if police have a reason to sift through the stored data, the fact that the data consists of plate information belonging to people who are innocent of wrongdoing is troublesome, Parsons said.

“I don’t think people go around their daily lives with the expectation that my movements are going to be monitored because at some point in the future I may be of interest to the police.”

The City of Guelph, whose bylaw enforcers also use licence plate readers, takes a different stance. If police want to see if the city’s licence plate readers have scanned a particular plate in the past, they have to file a formal request or come with a warrant, said Doug Godfrey, the city’s manager of bylaw compliance. No such request has been made, he said.

He also noted that data related to “hits” are stored for one year, while “non-hit” data are deleted after three days. “We’re very privacy conscious,” he said.

The municipality of Whistler, B.C., also uses licence plate readers. Unless there is a violation, data is purged after 24 hours, said municipality spokeswoman Claire Piech. If police ever asked for access to the database, she said, “we would decline.”

The Calgary Parking Authority is now conducting a privacy impact assessment of its ParkPlus System, spokeswoman Shelley Trigg said.

Uses by police

In a growing number of cities, police cars are also being equipped with licence-plate scanners.

The RCMP first adopted the technology in B.C. in 2006. Today, 47 RCMP and municipal police vehicles across B.C. have them.

In December, the Ontario Provincial Police announced they were expanding the number of vehicles with the devices from four to 27. RCMP and municipal police across Saskatchewan will soon have 20 vehicles with the technology. Winnipeg police expect to have five by year’s end.

Other agencies, such as the Ottawa Police, are studying it.

How a “hit” is triggered varies by agency. RCMP in B.C. and Saskatchewan, as well as the Ontario Provincial Police, check scanned plates against federal and provincial databases containing licence plates associated with stolen vehicles, suspended drivers and wanted individuals. In Winnipeg, police use the technology to identify stolen cars and suspended drivers, but not wanted persons.

If somebody wants to go fishing, come with a court order

If a scanned plate matches a plate on these “hot lists,” the officer will be alerted to the “hit” and could pull the vehicle over. Data associated with a “hit” is stored for two years in B.C. and five years in Ontario.

Scanned plates that don’t trigger a “hit” are scrubbed from computers at the end of each shift or day in B.C., Saskatchewan and Ontario.

“Collecting personal information for law enforcement purposes does not extend to retaining information on the suspicionless activities of citizens just in case it may be useful in the future,” B.C’s privacy commissioner wrote in a 2012 report.

But in Winnipeg, both “hit” and “non-hit” data are stored indefinitely.

“We haven’t deleted any data yet. It is kept in a database,” said Staff Sgt. Rob Riffel. “Only the program manager, one of my patrol sergeants, has access to it.”

Riffel couldn’t say why the data is stored so long.

Might investigators be tempted to poke around in the stored licence-plate data to see if a particular vehicle was spotted in the past?

Cpl. Robert McDonald, spokesman for the B.C. RCMP’s traffic division, said it’s possible, but querying the data must be approved by an officer in charge and be related to an active investigation.

Harry Alkema, project manager for the OPP’s communications and technology services bureau, said querying the system is not automatic.

“If somebody wants to go fishing, come with a court order,” he said.

Winnipeg police said the only time they searched all the plates the agency had ever scanned was when a citizen filed a freedom-of-information request to see if their plate was among them.

It wasn’t.

South of the border

Privacy worries recently forced the Department of Homeland Security to shelve plans to develop a national licence-plate tracking system using data collected from commercial and law enforcement plate readers. Officials had intended to use it to catch fugitive illegal immigrants, the Washington Post reported.

In December, police in Boston suspended the use of licence scanners after a Boston Globe investigation revealed questionable data management, including the accidental release of more than 69,000 plate numbers that had triggered “hits.”

To call attention to the use of licence plate readers, the American Civil Liberties Union has created a website with the ominous warning “You are being tracked.”

Some private U.S. companies are now using the technology to create huge databases of scanned licence plates and sharing that information with police, private investigators, insurance companies, banks and others.

One company, TLO, which was recently acquired by TransUnion, claims to have amassed a database of over one billion vehicle sightings. TransUnion spokesman Clifton O’Neal said the data is collected from a “third party vendor” but he would not say who.

Another company, Digital Recognition Network of Texas, was more open. CEO Chris Metaxas said the company’s vehicle sightings database relies on a network of “hundreds” of repossession agents in cities across the U.S. whose vehicles are equipped with automated licence plate readers.

Licence plates are metadata; they contain no personal information and carry no expectation of privacy, he said. Metaxas said the database helps police solve major crimes and financial institutions recover assets. “I believe these advocates are promoting misinformation and trying to scare people,” he said.

So far, his database does not include vehicle sightings from Canada, but he says he is working on it.