Citizen Lab Post-doctoral fellow Christopher Parsons was interviewed in The Calgary Herald on the issue of privacy and mass surveillance.
In Calgary, “parking enforcement officers drive the city’s streets in cars equipped with cameras designed to scan licence plates and identify parking scofflaws. Even if no violation has been committed, the city still holds on to data showing the time and location the vehicle was spotted, as well as a photo of the vehicle.
As use of licence-plate scanning technology grows in Canada among bylaw enforcement agencies and police departments there is no consistency as to how long such data is retained or who it’s shared with.”
The technology is becoming a “mass surveillance” tool and demands better oversight, said Parsons. “It doesn’t matter that there are positive intentions behind this. It’s a surveillance system,” he said.
To read the full article, see here.