Virginia Supreme Court Holds that Police License Plate Readers Collect Personal Information
Monday, May 7, 2018
The Virginia Supreme Court held
that license plate images taken by law enforcement agencies constitute
“personal information,” reviving a challenge to the police storage of license
plate data.
Automatic license plate readers
(“ALPRs”) are used by police departments across the country to take thousands
of photos of license plates per hour.
Officers check these numbers against lists of stolen or wanted
vehicles. Because ALPRs also record the
date, time and location of the license plate image, groups such as the American
Civil Liberties Union have argued that this collection is an invasion of
privacy that allows police to track a person’s movements.
The Virginia Supreme Court’s
ruling marks a significant development in a case challenging the mass
collection of license plate images and location data by ALPRs. In 2015, the ACLU sued the Fairfax County
Police Department (“FCPD”) on behalf of Harrison Neal, a motorist whose license
plate had been captured twice and stored pursuant to a FCPD policy for one
year. Neal alleged that FCPD’s
collection and storage of ALPR data violates Virginia’s Data Act, a statute
designed to prevent the unnecessary collection and storage of personal
information by government agencies.
However, the circuit court rejected Neal’s claim. The court ruled that a license plate number
is not “personal information” under the Data Act because the number refers to a
vehicle rather than an individual.
On appeal to the Virginia Supreme
Court, Neal argued that the state legislature broadly defined personal
information in the Data Act to include inferences about an individual’s
“personal characteristics, activities, or associations.” Because a vehicle is registered to an owner,
officers can infer that owner’s location and other information associated with
the owner based on decals, bumper stickers, and “silhouettes” of occupants
inadvertently captured by ALPR photos.
In response, FCPD argued that the ALPR database is not governed by the
Data Act because it only maintains information about the license plate number
and does not contain personally identifying information about the owner or
driver of the vehicle. Lastly, the FCPD
argued for a broad exemption from the Data Act because the ALPR database is
used to solve crime.
Although the Virginia Supreme
Court agreed with the circuit court that the license plate number is not
personal information, the court held that the license plate image and
associated data are personal information under the Data Act. The Court reasoned that full photographs
snapped by license plate readers “afford a basis for inferring personal
characteristics” and the presence of an individual at a certain place and
time. Additionally, the Court rejected
FCPD’s crime-solving exemption and emphasized that FCPD’s “sweeping randomized
surveillance and collection of personal information” was not connected to criminal
investigations and intelligence gathering.
Lastly, the Court remanded the case to the circuit court for further
hearings on whether the ALPR record-keeping process stores personally
identifying information about the owner or driver of the vehicle.