Automatic Number-Plate Recognition System Exposes 9 Million Records
Sheffield City Council's automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) system in the UK exposed 8.6 million records of road journeys made by thousands of people, The Registerreports.
The Register claims that ANPR camera system's internal management dashboard could be accessed by simply entering its IP address into a web browser, and no login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system – which logs where and when vehicles, identified by their number plates, travel through Sheffield's road network. According to The Register, a total of 8,616,198 records of vehicle movements, by time, location, and number plate, could be searched through the dashboard, and that number constantly grew as more number plates were captured by the 100 live cameras feeding the system, and locations of vehicles that were logged along with timestamps.