Private automated license plate recognition networks are photographing vehicles across the United States and adding each encounter to enormous databases.
Those records include plates, photographs, locations, and timestamps, and the information can be sold or made available to customers ranging from lenders and repossession companies to insurance companies and law enforcement.
Police ALPR networks have generated plenty of controversy lately, but determining exactly who is looking at privately held data, and why, can be considerably more difficult.
Nine Billion Photos and Counting
One of the biggest players is Digital Recognition Network, better known as DRN.
Today it is part of Motorola Solutions, which acquired DRN and its law-enforcement-focused sibling Vigilant Solutions when it bought VaaS International Holdings for $445 million in 2019.
At the time, Motorola described the business as providing vehicle-location data to both public-safety and commercial customers through fixed and mobile license plate reader cameras.
The scale is enormous, and it does not rely on DRN’s marketing claims to establish that.
A California appeals court recently noted that, as of May 2024, DRN’s system contained more than 9 billion historical license plate images.
Those are not simply nine billion pictures of license plates.
The court described records containing images of plates and vehicles along with the date, time, and location where each image was captured.
DRN sells ALPR hardware, including fixed cameras and mobile systems that can be mounted to vehicles such as tow trucks.
