Feds Share Captured License Plate Data With Insurance Companies
It may come as little surprise that every time you cross the border, cameras record your license plate number and feed it into a database of driver locations. More disturbing, perhaps, is the fact that the government seems to share that automobile surveillance data with an unexpected third party: insurance companies.
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 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.
Source: Forbes. Read full article. (link)
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Yet another reason I appreciate having company cars for such travel, leaving the Red Barchetta for plasure cruises.
Fuck you, government and insurance companies both.
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Those license plate readers also appear at the interior checkpoints, not just the border crossings. I got to experience several of those in a recent road trip (thankfully in a rental car).
Papiere, bitte?