BC Privacy Commissoner’s Report Finds Automated Licence Plate Recognition Technology Runs Afoul of Privacy Law

On 15 November 2012, Elizabeth Denham, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, released a report of her office’s investigation into the use of Automated Licence Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology by municipal police in the rovince (Denham Report), recommending changes to the program to bring it into compliance with British Columbia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). The ALPR pilot program is a joint venture between the RCMP and municipal police forces. Infrared cameras mounted on equipped police cruisers automatically recognize and photograph any licence plate within a detectable radius. Optical character recognition software then converts the licence plate photograph to text and searches an RCMP-provided database for hits. Thus, ALPR allows for the otherwise manual process of an officer searching a database with licence information to (i) be automated, and (ii) occur for every vehicle in the vicinity. The system alerts the officer of any match, which may arise in the case of stolen vehicles, wanted persons or suspended or uninsured drivers, for example. The program also stamps ‘hit’ and ‘non-hit’ data with GPS and time information, then transmits both as part of a “daily scan record” to the RCMP – acts which run afoul of provincial privacy law, according to the Denham Report. FIPPA stated goal is to protect personal privacy by, among other means, preventing the unauthorized collection, use or disclosure of personal information by ‘public bodies’, which includes the municipal police in BC. The Denham Report found that collection of the data by municipal police was authorized for the purpose of law enforcement - a specific exception outlined in FIPPA. However, since disclosure of non-hit data by municipal police to the RCMP could not reasonably accord with this purpose, a reconfiguration of the program to delete all data associated with a record immediately after it is established as a non-hit was recommended in the Denham Report. If the recommendation were followed, the RCMP would receive only data from hits, and not the non-hit data of law-abiding individuals. Immediate deletion of non-hit data would bring the BC program in line with the same ALPR pilot project operated by Ontario police, which has now been configured to retain and transmit to the RCMP only hit data. Being a national police force under federal jurisdiction, the RCMP is not within the jurisdiction of the BC FIPPA, and thus their actions in the project avoided scrutiny in the Denham Report. However, the RCMP is explicitly mentioned in the federal Privacy Act, which prohibits the collection of personal information by government institutions unless it relates directly to an operating program or activity of the institution. As a result, the RCMP may also be limited in its ability to collect and retain non-hit data, if the necessity of such maintaining data cannot be linked to the objective of the project. For news reports on ALPR, follow these links: CBC: http://tinyurl.com/cvj3vhs CTV: http://tinyurl.com/c7b2e87 Windsor Star : http://tinyurl.com/d2cbfpf Summary by: John Lucas