If you’re driving in London, chances are you’ll be seen by a camera.
The city uses a network of Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras to scan the roads for vehicles entering and leaving its road loading zones.
The UK road system is covered with these cameras.
Each day, about 13,000 capture 55 million “reads,” as license plate IDs are known, according to data from the National Police Chiefs Council.
But nowhere are they more densely packed than in the capital, which is believed to have around 2,000 cameras, sending tens of millions of readings a day to its operator, Transport for London.
Now London’s mayor has given police access to more data from a larger number of cameras and privacy advocates are up in arms.
“It’s a bit scary,” says London Assembly member Sian Berry, who is launching a legal challenge to the mayor’s decision along with privacy campaigners the Open Rights Group.
They warn that while license plate scans of cars may seem innocent, they are not.
First, because a vehicle trip log is an intimate view of a driver’s or passenger’s movements.
Second, because ANPR cameras don’t just scan numbers and letters, they also take photos, including a “front-of-the-vehicle photo” that captures everything around it when the image is captured.
This includes the color and make of vehicles, and potentially the faces of passing drivers and pedestrians, what London authorities refer to as “enhanced contextual data”.
Use the Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
2:39 Are you being watched? Upload in ANPR
Previously, the Metropolitan Police only had access to ANPR camera data in central London and received no images, only a “readout” of where and when a number plate was collected.
The force has now been given full access to cameras in central London, an area where many more people live than central London (3.8 million compared to 200,000), and will also be able to view photographs.
The City did not respond to a request for comment, but the Metropolitan Police defended the need for the data, saying it helps police protect the public and prevent errors in vehicle identification.
The ANPR footage was “highly unlikely to be of sufficient quality to identify the driver or passengers”, the force said, adding that in any case Londoners can have “little expectation of privacy” when they drive their cars.
Image: Sadiq Khan’s decision has been criticized by campaign groups
Ms. Berry is more specific. He says the extra access creates the prospect of a privacy advocate’s worst nightmare: a database full of deeply personal data that police can search whenever they want.
“We know that there have been police officers who have been disciplined and expelled for harassing their ex-partners using data that the police have,” he says.
“When there aren’t adequate internal controls, it really increases the risk of this kind of harm.”
Ms Berry points out that the police can obtain data from ANPR cameras for an investigation, a power the Metropolitan Police used 33,000 times in 2020 alone, but they must request and give reasons for using the data.
The access given by the mayor could create a database for the police to “play with”, he says, noting that it would be simple to run facial recognition scans on the images.
In a letter to the mayor announcing their intention to take legal action, Berry and the Open Rights Group argue that the decision to extend the powers of the Metropolitan Police in this way was unlawful, because it was granted without due consultation.
When Sadiq Khan authorized access in May this year, he cited a public consultation held in 2014, an exercise which campaigners and their lawyers at Bindmans argue cannot account for such a large increase in police access.
Read more on Sky News: How was Sarah Everard’s killer caught?
“With the stroke of a pen, Sadiq Khan has taken a decision which infringes on the basic privacy rights of millions of Londoners,” says Jim Killock, chief executive of the Open Rights Group, which is calling on the mayor to hold a meeting at large scale public consultation in motion.
Killock fears there could be worse to come as the mayor plans to expand the ultra-low emission zone to cover the whole of Greater London from the end of 2023, significantly increasing the number and range of ANPR cameras.
If that happens, he says, “every car, driver and pedestrian in Greater London will be subject to surveillance by the Metropolitan Police, but Londoners have had no say in this.”