Licence plates

Seanachai

Is it illegal to post photos online showing car licence plates?

IITYWYBMAD

Seanachai wrote: »

Is it illegal to post photos online showing car licence plates?

No.

Claw Hammer

Seanachai wrote: »

Is it illegal to post photos online showing car licence plates?

It may be, if the licence plates tend to identify someone.

GerardKeating

Claw Hammer wrote: »

It may be, if the licence plates tend to identify someone.

Also might depend on where one uploads them, for example on some kind of crime stopper page, which could make it defamation or stalking.

biko

Well, then the Parking like an idiot thread in Motors is in trouble...

coylemj

It's all about the context. I posted this in another thread in Jan. 2017, the OP had noted that newspapers were now blurring out registration plates ...............

coylemj wrote: »

They are covering their asses because of two cases where people claimed that they were defamed through their images or just their car registration plates being shown on TV ....

1. Garda Commissioner Larry Wren happened to be passing in Henry St. one day (he was in civvies, might have even been retired) when RTE recorded a video clip for use in a piece about selling fake cigarettes or similar. Nobody in the editing studio spotted him so his image was carried in the report. He sued, RTE settled.

2. A female barrister was in a queue of cars at a Garda checkpoint one day. RTE recorded a few seconds of video showing the queue of cars, probably in a piece about drink driving enforcement coming up to Christmas.

She sued, claimed half the people in the law library would have recognised her car and assumed she was stopped for drink driving. RTE settled.

Peregrinus

Yeah, it all depends on the context in which you display the image, and the purpose for which you display it. Showing Joe Bloggs' number plate in an article about drink driving or motoring offences has an obvious defamatory innuendo; showing the same number plate in an article about traffic congestion or petrol prices does not. Newspaper editors will tend to err on the side of obscuring number plates if there is any chance at all that the context could have pejorative connotations.

Seanachai

Peregrinus wrote: »

Yeah, it all depends on the context in which you display the image, and the purpose for which you display it. Showing Joe Bloggs' number plate in an article about drink driving or motoring offences has an obvious defamatory innuendo; showing the same number plate in an article about traffic congestion or petrol prices does not. Newspaper editors will tend to err on the side of obscuring number plates if there is any chance at all that the context could have pejorative connotations.

It's a Facebook Covid 19 page where people are posting photos of people driving to beauty spots.

GM228

biko wrote: »

Well, then the Parking like an idiot thread in Motors is in trouble...

It may need to be reviewed.

Also from the 2017 thread mentioned by Coylemj:-

GM228 wrote: »

Fred Swanson wrote: »

Number plates are not personal data.

I have a previous e-mail from the DPC confirming that car registration plates are considered a form of personal data as per the EUs Article 29 "Opinion 4/2007 on the Concept of Personal Data" as it will indirectly make someone identifiable.
http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/docs/wpdocs/2007/wp136_en.pdf

3. THIRD ELEMENT: “IDENTIFIED OR IDENTIFIABLE” [NATURAL PERSON]

The Directive requires that the information relate to a natural person that is “identified or identifiable”. This raises the following considerations. In general terms, a natural person can be considered as “identified” when, within a group of persons, he or she is "distinguished" from all other members of the group. Accordingly, the natural person is “identifiable” when, although the person has not been identified yet, it is possible to do it (that is the meaning of the suffix "-able"). This second alternative is therefore in practice the threshold condition determining whether information is within the scope of the third element. Identification is normally achieved through particular pieces of information which we may call “identifiers” and which hold a particularly privileged and close relationship with the particular individual. Examples are outward signs of the appearance of this person, like height, hair colour, clothing, etc… or a quality of the person which cannot be immediately perceived, like a profession, a function, a name etc. The Directive mentions those “identifiers” in the definition of “personal data” in Article 2 when it states that a natural person "can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity".

"Directly" or "indirectly" identifiable

Further clarification is contained in the commentary to the Articles of the amended Commission proposal, in the sense that "a person may be identified directly by name or indirectly by a telephone number, a car registration number, a social security number, a passport number or by a combination of significant criteria which allows him to be recognized by narrowing down the group to which he belongs (age, occupation, place of residence, etc.)". The terms of this statement clearly indicate that the extent to which certain identifiers are sufficient to achieve identification is something dependent on the context of the particular situation. A very common family name will not be sufficient to identify someone - i.e. to single someone out - from the whole of a country's population, while it is likely to achieve identification of a pupil in a classroom. Even ancillary information, such as "the man wearing a black suit" may identify someone out of the passers-by standing at a traffic light. So, the question of whether the individual to whom the information relates is identified or not depends on the circumstances of the case.

This is why the EU insisted Google blured plates on Google Earth.


EDIT: There was also a 2013 case in the UK where Hertfordshire Police fell foul with the Information Commissioners Office who also confirmed licence plates were considered personal data as per decision FS50186040.

Recently, the ICO took enforcement action against Hertfordshire Constabulary in circumstances where breach of the DPA by the police could have been avoided had a DPA been carried out. The Constabulary had installed automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras to monitor traffic going in and out of the town of Royston. In a landmark decision, the ICO declared the practice to be unlawful and ordered the Constabulary to cease all processing of information recorded by the cameras immediately and not to resume until an assessment of the risk to individuals’ privacy has been conducted which demonstrates that the practice is in compliance with the requirements of the DPA.

The system was deemed to be unlawful by the ICO because license plates and other vehicle registration marks constitute personal data under the DPA and, as such, the Constabulary was under a duty not to process personal data that was excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which it was collected originally. In addition, the practice was found to be a violation of the vehicle license plate holders’ right to privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

coylemj

Worth noting that media probably wouldn't be so worried nowadays about showing licence plates at a Garda checkpoint since drink driving checks are now carried out at random. Simply being stopped in a line of cars at a checkpoint today would not carry any suggestion of guilt or the suspicion of drink driving.

Peregrinus

coylemj wrote: »

Worth noting that media probably wouldn't be so worried nowadays about showing licence plates at a Garda checkpoint since drink driving checks are now carried out at random. Simply being stopped in a line of cars at a checkpoint today would not carry any suggestion of guilt or the suspicion of drink driving.

Depends. If the photograph is illustrating an article, the gist of which is "Guards to mount big crackdown on drink-driving this Christmas!", that's one thing; the innuendo is that the motorists are being stopped because the guards are stopping lots of motorists. But if the article is "big increase in drink-driving offences!" that's another; the innuendo is that the people illustrated are guilty, or at least suspected, of drink-driving offences.

I can see why time-pressed photo subeditors would usually default to blurring the number plates. Unless the identity of the person whose car is in the picture is material to the story, nothing is lost by blurring the number plate. Whereas something could] be lost by not blurring the number plate, and you can't tell whether it will or not without reading the story and thinking about it, and subeditors don't have time for that.

(Fun fact: newspaper headlines and photo captions are written by people who didn't write, and mostly haven't read, the story to which they are attached.)

Claw Hammer

Outside of the defamation issues, there are data-processing considerations as well. The context in which the number plate was acquired and used to which the image is being put are all relevant.