#Things that require ilicense license#

“Attorneys general who are claiming they’re going to protect abortion access need to look at their data systems. Law enforcement needs to talk to their city council members about how they’re going to address this,” Maass says. Maass says these issues will have to be addressed throughout the country.

#Things that require ilicense license#

Georgia, whose pending law would ban abortions after the detection of fetal cardiac activity, allows police to store license plate data for up to 30 months after collection. Other states may limit license plate data storage to between 21 and 90 days.

New Hampshire isn’t storing this data for long, but Arkansas-which last month criminalized nearly all abortion care-allows the data to be stored for 150 days. Like abortion laws, ALPR regulations vary state by state. It’s not necessarily law enforcement but individual actors who might be trying to enforce abortion laws under things like Texas’ SB 8,” Maass says. “One of the things I’m concerned about is this big private database that is operated by DRN Data. Anti-abortion groups have also been known to write down people’s license plate numbers at abortion clinics over the years, Maass notes, so they may even have a database of license plate numbers already available to them that they could search through. That law allows anyone in the US to sue abortion providers, anyone who “aids or abets” someone seeking an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected (typically around six weeks)-or anyone with intent to help someone receive an illegal abortion in the state. Thanks to the passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB 8), he says anti-abortion groups could use license plate data in litigation against whole swaths of people. Maass notes that police aren’t the only ones who could utilize ALPR data to track people seeking abortion access. “It’s a huge problem that people are sharing data without really being deliberate about who they’re sharing it with and why,” says Dave Maass, director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Police departments around the country regularly share ALPR data with each other, and the data is often shared with little oversight. Once the person seeking an abortion has left the state, a police department could look for license plate data in another state through the private databases, or they could obtain this data via a police department in that state.

“The more densely situated ALPR scanners are, the more they come to resemble GPS tracking,” Stanley says. Police don’t need a warrant to obtain this information because license plates are out in the open and can be seen by anyone, which is not necessarily the case when the police want to obtain someone’s location data from their phone or use another tracking method. With that information, they may be able to sketch out that person’s travel patterns. If someone is traveling out of state to get an abortion, police could likely repeatedly identify where their license plate was scanned during the trip and the times it was scanned. Stanley says that ALPRs are more concentrated in metropolitan areas, but they’re also common in rural areas.