According to two experts, the police may have breached the right to privacy and GDPR regulations" by using license plate scanners.
As a tool, the police's number plate scanners have been praised to the skies for revealing everything from insurance fraud to car theft. But the police have also used the automatic number plate recognition completely wrongly. Actually downright illegal. This is the opinion of two lawyers specializing in personal data law, whom the tech media Radar spoke to. The number plate scanners, which are found on many police cars, are not content with just taking pictures of the number plate itself. The technology also includes the driver's face. And that practice, say the lawyers, can both be at odds with the right to privacy and the GDPR regulations. – The basic problem with the ANPG order is that you cannot see or read that these cameras also take pictures of the driver of the car. READ ALSO: The police used a new trick – 246 motorists discovered the photo van far too late – You can't read that out of the law', says Tanja Kammersgaard Christensen, who has written a PhD thesis on the legal framework for police surveillance and is an assistant professor at Aalborg University, for Radar. The Norwegian and Swedish police have the solution According to Tanja Kammersgaard Christensen, the problem is that the law in this area is not at all concrete enough. For the same reason, the police are actually not authorized to use the ANPG technology – as it is also called – in the way they do today. And while the police here at home can't figure it out. Have their colleagues in both Norway and Sweden already solved the problem. Literally like that from behind. The police in our neighboring Nordic countries aim the ANPG cameras at the traffic in such a way that the cameras only photograph the rear number plates. That way, no faces appear in the pictures.