Wednesday, August 22, 2012
U.S. Customs Tracks Millions Of License Plates And Has Shared Data With Insurance Firms
Greenberg, Andy. "U.S. Customs Tracks Millions Of License Plates And Has Shared Data With Insurance Firms." Forbes, August 21, 2012.
From the article: "Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and released Tuesday by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) catalogue just how pervasive automatic license plate readers have become at the Mexican and Canadian borders, with cameras placed in dozens of U.S. cities each capturing images of millions or tens of millions of plates a year. But the FOIA’d records (PDF here) also include memos outlining the sharing of that license plate data between the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and most significantly, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an Illinois non-profit composed of hundreds of insurance firms including branches of Allstate, GEICO, Liberty, Nationwide, Progressive, and State Farm." Read more