Police Departments Tracking Your Vehicle Movements Daily

A Ford executive recently reported that Ford Motor Company knows where all of its customers are and knows when they are breaking the law.  Well something you may not know is that the police officer who just passed you on the street in his cruiser has a camera that collected a photo of your vehicle, of the driver and occupants and your license plate.  Also, it recorded your location via GPS.  Before he was out of site, your information was uploaded to a police database that is used to track your movements.

Even if your car is parked at a friends house or in your own driveway, the police have a record of it anytime they drive by.

According to police departments, this information isn't just used to look for stolen cars or wanted suspects although few stolen cars are recovered this way:

An ACLU study, based on 26,000 pages of responses from 293 police departments and state agencies across the country, found that license plate scanners produced a small fraction of "hits," or alerts to police that a suspicious vehicle had been found.

This information is also used in cases where they want to go back in time and see where a suspect may go each day and what they do.  This information can be used to put together a case of circumstantial evidence against you years later.  Some departments keep this information indefinitely.

Nationwide, they have amassed hundreds of millions of digital records tracking the movements of all Americans.

The ACLU says the scanners are creating "a single, high-resolution image of our lives."
"There's just a fundamental question of whether we're going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine," said Catherine Crump, an attorney with the ACLU.

In fact, the ACLU claims that these systems aren't being used to recover stolen vehicles at all, but are instead being used to gather intelligence.  They cite a newspaper investigation where the plates of a stolen motorcycle were captured 60 times, yet the person was never stopped.

The group is asking that police departments nationwide delete all records of cars not linked to any crime, which has been summarily ignored.

Drivers beware.