According to a Gizmodo article (August 13, 2018) -- Since 2016, Sacramento County officials have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients. Investigators working fraud cases have used the data for two years on a “case-by-case” basis.
License plate readers (LPR) are essentially cameras that upload photographs to a searchable database of images of license plates. Each image captured by these cameras is annotated with information on the registered owner, the make and model of the car, and time-stamped GPS data on where it was last spotted. Those with access, usually police, can search the database using a full or partial license plate number, a date or time, year and model of a car, and so on.
Anyone with access to that data could use it track where someone drove and when, provided they were scanned by the LPR. The privacy concerns are obvious, as where people go reveals a lot of privileged information about them. For instance, they could be visiting an STD clinic, an immigration office, or a relative’s homes.
Welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento’s 193,000 recipients. Mike Herald, director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty, stated: “I think we’re only picking on a group of people who are extremely poor and they want to create a perception with the public that there is a real big fraud problem with welfare programs.”
The Sacramento Bee reports that county welfare fraud investigators with the Department of Human Assistance accessed the data over a thousand times in two years.
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