The mayor of London has granted the Metropolitan Police access to more data from an increased number of ANPR cameras located throughout the city.
If you drive in London, you’re likely to be captured on video.
The city employs a network of Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras to detect vehicles entering and exiting its road-charging zones.
The roads of the United Kingdom are covered by these cameras.
According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, around 13,000 capture 55 million “reads” (also known as number plate identifications) every day.
Transport for London receives tens of millions of reads per day from an estimated 2,000 cameras throughout the capital city, which is the densest concentration of such devices anywhere in the world.
Now that the mayor of London has granted police access to more data from a greater number of cameras, privacy advocates are outraged.
“It’s sort of alarming,” says London Assembly member Sian Berry, who is challenging the mayor’s decision in court alongside privacy advocates from the Open Rights Group.
They advise that although scanning license plates may seem harmless, it is not.
First, a record of a vehicle’s route provides an intimate glimpse into the movements of a driver or passenger.
Second, because ANPR cameras do not just scan for numbers and letters, they also take photographs, including a “front of vehicle photo” that captures everything in the immediate vicinity.
This includes the color and manufacture of vehicles, as well as the faces of drivers and pedestrians – what the London government calls “enhanced contextual data.”
Before this, the Metropolitan Police only had access to data from ANPR cameras in central London and did not obtain any photos, simply “read” where and when a license plate was captured.
Now, the force has full access to cameras across inner London, a region where significantly more people dwell than in central London (3,8 million versus 200,000), and it can also view images.
City Hall did not respond to a request for comment, but the Metropolitan Police justified the need for the data, stating that it aided in protecting the public and avoiding mistakes in vehicle identification.
The force stated that ANPR photos were “very unlikely to be of adequate quality to identify the driver or passengers” and that Londoners driving automobiles have “little expectation of privacy.”
Ms. Berry is more particular. She asserts that the new access presents the possibility of a privacy advocate’s worst nightmare: a police-searchable database containing highly personal information.
“We do know that police officers have been reprimanded and fired for stalking their ex-partners using police-held data,” she says.
When there are insufficient internal controls, the likelihood of this type of injury grows significantly.
Ms. Berry notes that the police can obtain data from ANPR cameras for an investigation, a power that the Metropolitan Police used 33,000 times in 2020 alone, but they must seek and justify the use of the data.
The access granted by the mayor could establish a database for police to “play with,” she says, adding that it would be easy to conduct facial recognition scans on the photographs.
Ms. Berry and Open Rights Group contend in a letter to the mayor informing him of their intent to pursue legal action that the decision to increase the Metropolitan Police’s powers in this manner was illegal since it was granted without sufficient consultation.
When Sadiq Khan authorized the access in May of this year, he cited a 2014 public consultation, which the campaigners and their attorneys at Bindmans contend cannot account for such a significant increase in police access.
“With the stroke of a pen, Sadiq Khan has violated the fundamental privacy rights of millions of Londoners,” says Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, which is urging the mayor to have a comprehensive public consultation on the decision.
Mr. Killock is concerned that things may get worse, as the mayor intends to expand the Ultra Low Emission Zone to cover all of Greater London by the end of 2023, therefore considerably expanding the number and breadth of ANPR cameras.
If this occurs, he argues, “every automobile, driver, and pedestrian in Greater London will be exposed to surveillance by the Metropolitan Police, but Londoners have no say in this matter.”
