Pueblo, Colorado is the latest Colorado town to purchase robots to track its own citizens via license plates, according to KOAA News in Colorado Springs.
Campfire Colorado recently reported that the town of Lafayette in Colorado was installing solar powered robots to track its own citizens’ movements.
The cameras are intended to help crack down on crime but come with serious privacy concerns for Coloradans who have committed no crime.
“The information captured by the readers — including the license plate number and the date, time, and location of every scan — is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years, or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights,” the ACLU says on its website according to a CBS report on the cameras in Lafayette.
Now, Colorado’s surveillance state seems set to grow once again in Pueblo, Colorado.
“Pueblo is getting some new tools to try and combat a rise in car thefts. The Pueblo Downtown Association purchased two Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras from a company named Flock Safety,” according to KOAA News. “The private business group is coordinating with the City of Pueblo and C-DOT to have them installed near busy intersections.”
According to the report, Flock Safety captures pictures of every car and licensed plate:
“So, (ALPR) does capture pictures of every car and license plate. That is correct. What I will tell you though is there’s no facial recognition involved and there’s not the ability to capture pictures specifically of people,” Beilin said.
The company claims that the images cannot “legally sell or share it with anonymous third-parties” and that “images are stored in the cloud under heavy encryption and are purged from the server every 30 days.”