Policies on License Plate Readers Vary Widely, Says A.C.L.U.

Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A license plate reader in Washington in 2011.

  License plate readers have proliferated across the country, from the Hudson River Valley to San Francisco Bay. But cities and states are all over the map on how long they hold information they collect and with whom they share it. That is according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, which collated license plate reader policies from nearly 300 law enforcement agencies around the country.

Minnesota State Patrol deletes the data after 48 hours. New Jersey requires its police departments to hold the data for five years. Grapevine, Tex., doesn’t specify, which means the city could keep the data for as long as it wants. Some police agencies are allowed to use the information picked up by license plate readers for any criminal investigation. Other agencies also share the information with so-called fusion centers, where data from various government sources are kept.

The A.C.L.U. says you should care because the license readers are another form of location tracking. It warns that “enormous databases of motorists’ location information are being created” that could lead law enforcement authorities “to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.”

License plate readers are often attached to bridges, street lights, and police patrol cars. They snap pictures of the license plate, record the date and time, and corresponding software turns it into readable data that can be stored and analyzed.

The readers present a classic case of how new technology bewilders the law. There is nothing that prohibits cameras in public places from collecting images. But the collection and analysis of location data has stumped judges, with some noting what a powerful window it can be into a person’s private life.

The mayor of Minneapolis learned from a public records request filed by The Star Tribune last year that license plate readers in his city had picked up his car 41 times in the previous year.

New AOL Reader product teased just days before Google Reader's shutdown

Once-mighty America Online appears to be working on a new RSS reader product, with about a week to go before Google pulls the plug on its own Reader.

“All your favorite websites, in one place,” the product’s landing page proclaims. The reader is currently in private beta; people can either request an invitation online or enter a code to use the service.

AOL Reader will launch and become available to everyone on Monday, a spokeswoman said. On the AOL Twitter feed, a Vine video was posted Friday afternoon depicting the landing page on a computer monitor. A series of sticky notes were pasted on top of the screen. "Yes, the rumors are true," one of them said.

No other information about the product could be gleaned from the AOL site or obtained from the company.

Besides AOL, a number of other companies have been promoting their own RSS reader services since Google announced in March that it would be shutting down Reader and some other products by July 1.

In its announcement, the company said it needed to focus on new opportunities, rather than spread itself “too thin and lack impact.”

One of the other reader players is Feedly, which earlier this week switched on its own RSS API (application programming interface) to let users transfer over their existing feeds to Feedly’s own back end.

Digg is also working on a Google Reader replacement, which is slated to go live next week, according to a company blog post.

Google Reader launched in 2005 to help people stay on top of their favorite websites using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.