Licence plate readers have sparked outrage in the U.S. Now they're being installed across Canada

But in the U.S., the same AI-driven technology has become a scourge.

The cameras, which capture and analyze images of vehicle licence plates and other characteristics in search of suspended drivers, stolen cars and wanted criminals, have been cut down and vandalized.

Meant as a public safety balm, they’ve become a source of public backlash against mass surveillance and police privacy violations after revelations that data from the cameras has been used to track and deport undocumented migrants and to illegally monitor the movements of romantic partners.

The American anger hasn’t been matched yet in Canada. Despite Premier Doug Ford’s decision one year ago to ban speed cameras, and the repeated vandalism of Toronto’s Parkside Drive camera, there has been little public debate about the adoption and installation of ALPRs.

South of the border, much of the criticism has focused on Flock Safety, which, according to DeFlock, produces most of the ALPR cameras used by U.S. police agencies. DeFlock has mapped more than 128,000 licence plate readers across the country.

“That is one of the cultural differences between Canada and the United States,” said Sarmad Rafi, a data science student at the University of Western Ontario. “For better or worse, they are more interested in the notion of preserving their rights or liberty.”

Bring the U.S. debate to Canada

Rafi is trying to spark a public awakening about ALPR cameras ahead of Ontario’s municipal elections in October by mapping what looks to some like a burgeoning high-tech police state.

In June, he launched a website, Panopti.ca, as a Canadian version of the DeFlock movement. So far, more than 600 ALPR cameras have been plotted on the map.

The majority appear to be in Ontario, the possible result of a 2022 decision by the Ford government to scrap licence plate registration stickers and give police a one-time $40-million grant to purchase their own licence plate recognition systems.

The technology, already widely used by private companies and municipalities for parking enforcement, is increasingly being deployed as a crime-fighting tool.

But privacy advocates in Canada say the growing use of licence plate readers raises the risk of misuse and could violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“If we have one ALPR in one location, that can tell you about people who are coming and going,” said Aislin Jackson, policy staff council with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. “But if you have a network across the city, you can track one particular car as it moves through the city and get a lot of information, potentially, about the activities of the person who owns that vehicle or the person who’s in that vehicle.”

Expanded police surveillance can also make people think twice before expressing themselves, joining a protest or freely going about their everyday lives.

“When we know we have surveillance devices and we don’t know what they do … that exerts a disproportionate chilling effect,” Jackson said. “The more transparent we can be about what data we’re collecting and why, and the more institutions behave in a way that demonstrates they can be trusted to colour in the lines that they’ve set for themselves, the less the chilling effect is going to be.” 

Uproar in America

In the U.S., Flock cameras, which feed licence plate information into a central database that clients pay to access, have been sold as a turbocharged tool that has helped find abducted children, capture fugitives from justice and reduce crime rates.

Len Phillips, an Atlanta-based member of the U.S. DeFlock group, said he is concerned because the cameras appeared in public spaces mostly without robust debate.

“We cherish our privacy, but we didn’t know what was happening,” he said.

A key moment in the anti-Flock movement came last February with the broadcast of a Super Bowl commercial to promote a new function of Ring home security cameras. The company proposed a feature allowing people to harness the collective power of their doorbell cameras to help find lost pets.

That sparked concern among privacy-sensitive Americans that ultimately prompted Ring to cancel a partnership with Flock Safety that would have allowed home security camera footage to be shared with local police forces. 

There have also been revelations that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have accessed Flock databases to search for undocumented immigrants, and that dozens of U.S. police officers have searched the Flock records to illegally monitor the movements of current and former romantic partners, an activity that has been dubbed “Flock stalking.”

It has resulted in that rarest of things in American politics: a bipartisan consensus, with left-wingers angered about Flock cameras tracking migrants and right-wing libertarians like pundit Tucker Carlson decrying the rise of a dystopian “slave state.”

Phillips said the U.S. Constitution protects against unreasonable search and seizure by obliging police to apply for judicial search warrants in investigations.

“If you’re out in public and somebody takes a picture of you, you have no expectations of privacy,” he said. “If the government takes a picture of you at every exit and interstate and every street corner, then puts all that together to know where you’re going and even what other cars are around you … that’s not the same thing.”

Police and government officials are starting to agree, however reluctantly, and deciding to suspend or abolish the use of ALPR cameras, either over abuse or until clear regulations are adopted.

Canadian questions 

The scrutiny is uncomfortable, but the debate is ultimately a good thing, said Andrew Elvish, vice president of Genetec, a Montreal-based supplier of ALPR systems.

“I think it is raising peoples’ awareness that they need to ask questions of their community leaders or the businesses they interact with,” he said, noting that, unlike Flock Safety, the data collected by Genetec cameras is held not centrally but on a client’s own computer servers, although there are functions that allow the data to be shared.

“I think that if communities don’t want to have that conversation, it says a lot about what is happening, but I do believe most communities do want to have that conversation. I think they just didn’t know how to approach it in many ways.”

Across Canada, there is limited information about where the cameras are located, how they are being used and what happens to the licence plate data of unsuspecting drivers. In some cases, it is held for 72 hours before being discarded from police computer servers; in other jurisdictions it’s seven days; in others still, it is kept for an entire month.

All of the Toronto Police Service’s cruisers are equipped with ALPR cameras from Axon, a publicly traded company based in Arizona. In addition, five Genetec Cloudrunner cameras have been installed at locations “with a recent history of violent activity,” a Toronto Police spokesperson told the Star.

Those locations include the U.S. consulate on University Avenue, which has been targeted twice by drive-by gunfire, and synagogues across the city. 

Police arrested two suspects earlier this month after the July 27 U.S. consulate shooting, which was captured on camera. But the vehicle was being driven without licence plates at the time of the shooting and was later found abandoned in Scarborough.

The Toronto Police Service Board has an artificial intelligence policy for the use of AI-powered tools like licence plate readers. Toronto Police classify ALPR systems as “low-risk.”

But Tamir Israel, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said police have a tendency to push the legal limits with new surveillance and investigative tools.

“Police will adopt a technology and start using it. Eventually it’ll come up in a criminal case and get challenged in that context, and then if the courts say this violates the Charter … then the legislature will step in and provide (a legal framework),” he said.

“Our public sector privacy laws have very broad exceptions for law enforcement. They’re not limitless exceptions … but they’re very broad, and I don’t think they’re fit for purpose anymore in that respect.”

Eyes on the road

The City of Brampton would not disclose where it has installed its 50 ALPR cameras, other than to say that the locations are based on traffic and community safety data and the technology is deployed “where it has the greatest potential to improve road safety.”

The Waterloo Regional Police Service operates a network of 12 surveillance cameras equipped with ALPR capabilities, with data being held for 30 days before being discarded.

One of the cameras is located in front of a Cambridge homeless shelter, although staff there said it appears to be pointed toward the roadway. Another one, also in Cambridge, is in the vicinity of a cannabis store in a strip mall. The police service has said that locations are chosen based on an analysis of historical crime and incident data, and that it can only access the information captured by the cameras if there is an investigation underway.

When the City of Kitchener voted to take part in the Waterloo Regional Police Service’s one-year camera trial last May, city officials recommended approving the project because it would boost public safety and decrease violent crime. But a report to city council acknowledged, “It is unknown if the program will be widely accepted in the community.”

Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic, who was born in Zagreb when it was part of communist Yugoslavia, voted against the pilot project, citing privacy concerns, according to a May 6 report from City News.

“I was born in a country where that lack of privacy existed,” he said. “I’ve also visited countries in Asia where cameras are being used and have crossed that line.”