Slashdot reader j3x0n shared this report from California newspaper the Sacramento Bee:
In 2015, Democratic Elk Grove Assemblyman Jim Cooper voted for Senate Invoice 34, which restricted regulation enforcement from sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) knowledge with out-of-state authorities. In 2023, now-Sacramento County Sheriff Cooper seems to be doing simply that. The Digital Frontier Basis (EFF) a digital rights group, has despatched Cooper a letter requesting that the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Workplace stop sharing ALPR knowledge with out-of-state businesses that would use it to prosecute somebody for searching for an abortion.
In keeping with paperwork that the Sheriff’s Workplace supplied EFF via a public data request, it has shared license plate reader knowledge with regulation enforcement businesses in states which have handed legal guidelines banning abortion, together with Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas. Adam Schwartz, EFF senior employees legal professional, known as automated license plate readers “a rising menace to everybody’s privateness … which are on the market by the hundreds in California…” Schwartz stated {that a} sheriff in Texas, Idaho or some other state with an abortion ban on the books may use that knowledge to trace folks’s actions round California, figuring out the place they dwell, the place they work and the place they search reproductive medical care, together with abortions.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Workplace is not the one one sharing that knowledge; in Might, EFF launched a report exhibiting that 71 regulation enforcement businesses in 22 California counties — together with Sacramento County — had been sharing such knowledge… [Schwartz] stated that he was not conscious of any circumstances the place ALPR knowledge was used to prosecute somebody for getting an abortion, however added, “We predict we should not have to attend till the inevitable occurs.”
In Might the EFF famous that the state of Idaho “has enacted a regulation that makes serving to a pregnant minor get an abortion in one other state punishable by two to 5 years in jail.”
