“As a result, a policy tool that the public should have confidence in will instead become another instrument of tracking and surveilling them. The council strongly opposes the system of mass surveillance which the Government intends to create as a side effect of implementing the bill.”
ANPR was virtually unheard of a decade ago, but is now being used about 700,000 times by police a year through two private systems set up to combat retail crime. NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is also introducing ANPR cameras to measure average speed on highways.
A privacy impact assessment for the agency noted: “Considering the Privacy Act’s wide definition of personal information, it will be very difficult to argue that the information collected through camera surveillance in a public place, involving the use of people’s motor vehicles, is not personal information.”
The congestion charging scheme aimed to cut transport costs, estimated to hit $2.6 billion in Auckland next year. Other cities might later jump on board the scheme.
Councils through Local Government NZ generally back the bill, but have called for more local control, and less control defaulting to NZTA, over what roads and what fees are covered and at what periods.
A congestion charging system would link its ANPR cameras with the NZTA’s motor vehicle registry.
The Privacy Foundation said the way ANPR was already being used trampled over privacy laws, and technology “creep” – where a system approved to do one thing turned out useful for another – was a real danger.
“We are concerned about the proliferation of automated surveillance throughout the private and public sectors in New Zealand, especially its potential use by law enforcement authorities as a back door mechanism,” it said in its submission. “The bill contains the potential for a significant erosion of the fundamental rights of New Zealanders.”
The way ANPR systems can retain and match vehicle data can allow analysis of patterns of movement and behaviour by AI systems, international studies said.
Police said they had strict controls around how they used ANPR, although there was limited external oversight.
Police were on the verge of completing their first full audit in a decade of their use of a large ANPR retail crime network, underpinned by technology from Auckland firm Auror.
Researchers who interviewed focus groups in Auckland and Wellington about ANPR found “significant” concerns.
“Concerns were raised regarding the duration of data retention by the systems, potential security breaches and the over-collection of data,” they wrote in a 2024 journal.
“They advocated for clear regulations to protect against unwarranted police access to traffic data. They suggested that police should be required to obtain a court order or other official permission to access the data.”
Documents showed police demand for ANPR footage related to retail crime had skyrocketed so high, they now had push-button access to it.
The Council for Civil Liberties said “data minimisation should be the highest priority” around congestion charging schemes, but instead the data could be spread to “any local authorities that are specified in an order in council”.
It advocated copying controls from a scheme in Stockholm that ordered no sharing, as well as fast deletion of data.
It noted how Singapore went from promising traffic camera data would be off-limits for certain purposes, to saying in 2016 that the security situation had changed so they needed to let officials access it “to collect and analyse suspicious travel patterns, and respond swiftly and decisively for our collective security”.
Local Government New Zealand said it was past time for the schemes “as a means to improve productivity and make better use of our infrastructure”. Its submission did not mention privacy protection.
Lobby group the NZ Initiative said privacy provisions in the bill seemed reasonable, but “we encourage the [select] committee to consider international best practice for protection of privacy”.
Images ANPR can capture:
- The number plate that leads to identifying registered owner of the vehicle.
- Meta data that includes time, date and location and direction of travel.
- Still photos and video footage of a vehicle that captures an aspect of the driver and/or passenger that may identify that person
- Images of occupants in sufficient detail to enable a count.
- Images that identify the behaviour of people in the vehicle.
-RNZ
