Few notice the "spotter car" from Manny Sousa's repo company as it scours Massachusetts parking lots, looking for vehicles whose owners have defaulted on their loans. Sousa's unmarked car is part of a technological revolution that goes well beyond the repossession business, transforming any industry that wants to check on the whereabouts of ordinary people.
An automated reader attached to the spotter car takes a picture of every license plate it passes and sends it to a company in Texas that already has more than 1.8 billion plate scans from vehicles across the country.
But the most significant impact of Sousa's business is far bigger than locating cars whose owners have defaulted on loans: It is the growing database of snapshots showing where Americans were at specific times, information that everyone from private detectives to insurers are willing to pay for.
While public debate about the license reading technology has centered on how police should use it, business has eagerly adopted the $10,000 to $17,000 scanners with remarkably few limits.
...Digital Recognition Network of Fort Worth, Texas, claims to collect plate scans of 40 percent of all US vehicles annually.
Digital Recognition Network, with the help of about 400 repossession companies across the United States, has increased the number of license scans in its database tenfold since September 2010, and the firm continues to add another 70 million scans per month, according to company disclosures. Digital Recognition's top rival, Illinois-based MVTRAC, has not disclosed the size of its database, but claimed in a
2012 Wall Street Journal interview to have scans of "a large majority" of vehicles registered in the United States.Unlike law enforcement agencies, which often have policies to purge their computers of license records after a certain period of time, the data brokers are under no such obligation, meaning their databases grow and gain value over time as a way to track individuals? movements and whereabouts.
Massachusetts private investigator Jay Groob said he uses the license plate database kept by a third data broker, TLOxp, paying $25 for a comprehensive report from the Florida-based company?s "very impressive" database of a billion-plus scans.
Groob said he would use the database to track a missing person or conduct background investigations for child custody or marital infidelity litigation. Groob said he "absolutely" foresees vehicle location data becoming part of private investigators? standard toolkit.
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