The Irvine Company Invading the Privacy of its Customers with ALPR

According to the EFF (July 10, 2018) the Irvine Company - a real estate company that operates malls and mini-malls in Irvine, La Jolla, Newport Beach, Redwood City, San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, CA - has been conducting automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance since just before Christmas 2016, and providing sensitive information collected to Vigilant Solutions, a surveillance technology vendor that in turn sells location data to Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE).

But ICE isn’t the only agency accessing the data. Vigilant Solutions shares data with as many as  1,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. Through its sister company, Digital Recognition Network, Vigilant Solutions also sells ALPR data to financial lenders, insurance companies, and debt collectors.

Automated license plate recognition is a form of mass surveillance in which cameras capture images of license plates, convert the plate into plaintext characters, and append a time, date, and GPS location. This data is usually fed into a database, allowing the operator to search for a particular vehicle’s travel patterns or identify visitors to a particular location. By adding certain vehicles to a “hot list,” an ALPR operator can receive near-real time alerts on a person’s whereabouts.
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Recording the license plate data of its customers and then selling that data to companies like Vigilant Solutions and Digital Recognition Network creates a substantial privacy risk for anyone shopping at the malls owned and operated by the Irvine Company.

I would feel highly uncomfortable knowing that my location data was being tracked and sold by the Irving Company anytime I visited one of their malls.