Shoppers at Opry Mills who report a car missing from the parking lot are increasingly finding out it wasn't stolen at all — it was towed by a repossession company that knew exactly where to find it. Richard Siegelman, the mall's head of security, says that happens three or four times a week, and he's now confirming the reason why: license plate readers at the Nashville mall are feeding vehicle location data straight to repo firms.
Cameras Built for Safety, Used for Something Else
Opry Mills uses license plate readers, and through those cameras, outside companies are able to see vehicles coming to the mall, according to wkrn.com. Siegelman told the outlet that information from those cameras goes out to repo companies, and that his mall averages probably about three or four repossessions a week. He said that's often confused for car theft: some people reporting their cars stolen had simply missed payments and had their vehicles repossessed, according to WSMV.
Siegelman added that the mall hasn't had an actual stolen car on the property in about two years — it's all been repossessions, per the wkrn.com report. He made the comments after speaking at a Metro Transportation Licensing Commission meeting this week, where he initially raised concerns about unlicensed taxis operating on mall property. Opry complex security heads spoke to a metro council this week about unlicensed taxis on their private property, WSMV reports. The Metro Nashville Police Department told wkrn.com that auto-theft data for Opry Mills was not immediately available, and WSMV separately reported that the department has not responded to its question about whether police have access to Opry Mills' camera data.
A Data Trail With No Clear Expiration Date
License plate readers automatically capture every plate that comes into view along with the vehicle's location, date and time, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The same organization notes that private vendors capture plate data with mobile scanners and then sell it to police agencies and others, and that the resulting databases can also be sold to companies like insurers, with law enforcement sometimes buying subscription access. Much of that information, the EFF says, is stored for extended periods — sometimes as long as five years.
That national pattern echoes what investigators have found specifically in the repossession industry. License plate reader cameras used by repo agents capture images of every scanned vehicle, not just those tied to missed payments, and that information is valuable well beyond repo men, according to a ABC7 Los Angeles investigation. One company it examined, MVTrac, had built a database of more than a billion license plate records nationwide and said it sells actionable data to repossessors, towing companies, banks, law enforcement, insurers and finance companies. An earlier report from syracuse.com found that license plate images and locations collected by repo agents were being sold again to global information-brokering companies, and that Destiny USA, a mall in Syracuse, was collecting plate data from its own parking lots.
How Big the Industry Has Gotten
The scale of private plate-tracking has grown enormously since the technology first appeared in American use in 1998, per the EFF. One vendor, DRN, has amassed more than 15 billion vehicle sightings across the country over more than a decade and claims in its own marketing to collect more than 250 million sightings a month, according to WIRED. Yet an EFF review of 63 California law-enforcement agencies in 2021 found that only 0.05 percent of the data collected by these readers was relevant to a public-safety interest at the moment it was captured.
In Tennessee, the debate over cameras has largely centered on police use rather than private ones like those at Opry Mills. Williamson County already has six license plate reader cameras operated by its sheriff's department, and a Tennessee Department of Transportation spokesperson said license agreements are in place with 60 cities or counties statewide that have installed more than 500 cameras, according to a separate WSMV report. That same report noted Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake had renewed his call for the city to approve the cameras after arguing they could have helped solve an Antioch greenway murder.
A Legal Gray Area for Private Lots
Tennessee law limits how long governmental entities can retain license plate reader data, capping it at no more than 90 days unless the information is part of an ongoing investigation, WSMV reports. But that retention law applies to governmental entities and does not apply to private operators — meaning a mall like Opry Mills, owned by Simon Property Group, isn't bound by the same clock. WSMV reported it contacted Simon Property Group to ask whether Opry Mills sells the information to other entities, and also made multiple attempts to speak with Siegelman about the broader surveillance and data-sharing questions.
Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell told WSMV that license plate readers can be a useful safety tool but that the technology is imperfect, and he said he shared with the state attorney general a scenario in which a private parking operator's license plate reader falsely flagged him. Adam Schwartz, a privacy expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told WSMV that public attention to license plate readers has increased sharply over the past year and that entities differ widely in how long they store and share the data — some keep it for only a few days, others for years. Schwartz said the data could be monetized or used to spy on people.
