DOT says cameras don't read plates; vendor policy allows video storage

The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities says temporary cameras recently placed in Palmer, Wasilla and Anchorage are being used to count pedestrians and vehicles, not to read license plates. A check of Miovision's own product materials supports that narrower claim, with an important caveat: the company's traffic-counting systems can still record and process public-traffic video, and its privacy policy sets no time limit on keeping it.

In a social media post, DOT&PF said the Miovision cameras are collecting anonymous traffic data to help determine pedestrian-crossing treatments between bus stops and shopping centers as part of an upcoming Highway Safety Improvement Project. The department said the cameras are usually installed for three to seven days before they are removed or moved to another traffic-study location. "They do NOT read or record license plates," DOT&PF wrote.

Miovision markets its Scout system as a portable, video-based traffic data collection device for vehicle counts, turning movements, pedestrian and bicycle counts, speed studies and road-safety analysis.

A public information page from Santa Clarita, California, which uses Miovision Scout devices, says the system collects vehicle, pedestrian and bicycle counts, that the video resolution is not high enough to identify faces or read license plates, and that the device is not used for enforcement. That describes how one California city says its own units are set up, not how Alaska's are.

Miovision's privacy policy is broader. It says the company's intelligent-mobility products are not intended to collect personal information and "are required to be deployed and configured by customers so as to obfuscate the identity of individuals." Obscuring identities is something the buyer configures, not something the hardware guarantees. The policy adds that some products "enable recording and/or uploading of traffic video," that uploaded video "may be stored in our systems," and that the company processes public-traffic video "for the purpose of training and validating our algorithms." Traffic video, it says, may be retained for research and development. It sets no retention period for it.

That makes DOT&PF's statement accurate as far as it goes. The available vendor material supports the claim that a standard Miovision Scout traffic-count deployment is not a license-plate-reader system.

What the vendor material cannot answer is how Alaska configured these particular units: whether video is uploaded, how long raw video is retained, who can access it, whether Alaska's deployment uses onboard processing or vendor review, and whether any retained data can be tied back to a time and place. DOT&PF has not been asked those questions and has published nothing addressing them. Its press page carries no release on the cameras, and the department's post could not be located on its public Facebook page, which shows only its most recent item to anyone not signed in.