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The UK has its own network of Flock-style AI cameras. So where’s the outrage? (www.thebureauinvestigates.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
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[–] 22 points 2 days ago (5 children)

The difference is ANPR is that Flock is a private business, collecting data and stalking people across the US for commercial purposes, which sold this data to law enforcement - meanwhile law enforcement were using the private sector to bypass the checks and balances of court warrants.

In the UK, ANPR is an official tool, not private. Police need to get authorisation to use it, and it is not used for commercial purposes.

It's still wank, but it's not quite as wank.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    It's not used for commercial purposes

    Maybe not in that way, but private car parks use ANPR all the time to fine you £70 for staying 1 minute over your allotted time

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago

    It's the same technology, but it's not the same network of cameras, is it? I'd assumed ParkingEye and the like would only have access to their own cameras that they had been contracted to set up by private land owners of car parks.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago* (2 children)

    I was thinking on this when I wrote my comment above, and I'm not quite sure.

    Either there's a muddying of terms, where you have ANPR as a technology (which anyone could implement), and the police have their own, separate network of ANPR cameras. Then the police can obtain footage from private cameras as needed through warrants.
    Or private entities submit their data to an ANPR database that the police maintain.

    Regardless, there's not one big private network of ANPR cameras that the government have permitted to be installed on public land, and the police still have checks and balances in place to prevent abuse.

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  • [–] 2 points 21 hours ago* (1 child)

    ANPR is just any camera with OCR targeted at reg plates.

    Police ANPR queries the Law Enforcement Data System, which contains data such as the car history, owner details, stolen cars, and persons of interest.

    Commercial ANPR queries the organisation’s proprietary database and also the publicly available DVLA data to gather the name and address of the owner.

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  • [–] 1 point 19 hours ago

    Awesome, that's pretty much what I thought.

    Just for clarity though, does the commercial ANPR automatically provide data to police, or is that data only available upon a lawful request with a court order?

    Also, the article mentions data being kept for a year. Is this a requirement for commercial ANPR?

    I'll also add that requests to the public DVLA database are only lawful if they have actual need to request that information, eg to send a ticket for a breach in parking terms. They can't access the name and address linked to every plate that drives by the camera.

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