Parking fines: How firms like ABM Industries may be using A.I. to target drivers.

He used to go to the Regal City North cinema in Chicago three times a week. ABM’s privacy policy states that the company does “not connect the name of the owner of the vehicle with the license plate unless specifically authorized or submitted by the owner of the vehicle,” suggesting that they are getting permission from car owners to use their vehicle registration information to send them fines. According to Tien, you can almost read the DPPA as two different laws—one that “tries to protect people but doesn’t do a great job of it,” or a law that’s simply masquerading as a privacy law, but it’s true intention is to create loopholes that allow the government and private companies to use private data, and make money off of it. Its principal rule is directed to state officials rather than private actors.” However, Scott Burnham, Illinois’ deputy secretary of state, told me that the ABM parking lot is “clearly violating the DPPA under the federal law,” as “states may only share personal information for limited purposes detailed in the DPPA, and a private entity using that personal data to collect on parking violations is definitely not one of them. But fast-forward to today, those conveniences and connections come with a price, meaning it puts our privacy and personal information at risk in a manner that would have been unthinkable three decades ago.” The fight to prevent private companies from using ALPR data to track vehicles has implications beyond parking fines.