Speeding, surveillance, and ANPR

NZTA will be trialling point-to-point speed cameras in Auckland, in the Waterview Tunnel and on the Southern Motorway. Speed is a killer, and these are a useful way of policing it. At the same time, there are obvious privacy concerns. The cameras use automatic number-plate recognition to identify vehicles and match entrance and exit times. The problem is that this effectively creates a database of vehicle movements. If the cameras spread, then there is a danger of introducing widespread surveillance by stealth.

There's an easy solution, of course: dump all information on non-speeding vehicles the moment a vehicle exits the zone. But its unclear at this stage whether NZTA will be doing that. So I guess I'll just have to lodge some OIA requests to find out.