More than 6,000 license plate reading cameras dot the landscape in the greater Atlanta metro area, according to data collected by DeFlock.
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The sheer number can make it nearly impossible for drivers to avoid being captured by at least one camera on their day-to-day drive.
“At some point a city reaches a saturation point. You drive the three miles to work and you pass multiple cameras, and it’s able to track when you go left somewhere, when you go right somewhere,” Dr. Matthew Guariglia, Sr. Police Analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.
“They don’t have to go to a judge, they don’t need to justify why they’re making a search of all this historic data, they can just sit in a computer and run a search. And so it is tailor-made for this abuse,” Guariglia said.
Dozens of Georgia law enforcement employees have been fired, arrested, resigned, or otherwise disciplined for alleged misuse of license plate reader systems in recent months.
Atlanta and other cities are debating what guardrails should be in place for license plate cameras after dozens of Georgia law enforcement officers have been caught abusing the technology.
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However, supporters often argue that large camera networks are part of what makes the technology effective.
Last month, Cherokee County authorities credited license plate reader technology with helping identify a Canton man accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who missed her school bus.
Investigators said the technology played a key role in identifying the suspect.
“If it weren’t for the technology they use to identify the suspect, It’s certainly unlikely we would be here today,” Captain Jay Baker said at the time.
However, critics say they violate personal privacy. “So does someone’s safety trump someone else’s liberty?” Stephen Upchurch, a Dunwoody resident, said.
Upchurch said he moved to Dunwoody for the good schools and to raise his children.
“We moved here for our kids,” he said. “We’re supposed to leave this place better than we found it for them. And I don’t think putting cameras up on every corner to watch and record them is going to be doing that for them.”
To test how difficult it is to avoid the cameras, Channel 2 Action News used FlockHopper, an application designed to help drivers route around known license plate readers.
A typical 15-minute commute was projected to pass roughly 30 cameras. An alternate “privacy route” took nearly twice as long and still passed two known cameras.
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