Privacy is not what it used to be in this country.

Technology keeps chipping away at the boundary between public and private, as we invite companies to share our homes and monitor our communications.

The government, too, has grown its ability to invade the private lives of citizens, through surveillance programs that have ballooned since 9/11 and now face reauthorization.

And then there’s the Supreme Court, which overturned Roe v. Wade last year in a ruling that, while ostensibly about abortion, threatens the legal underpinnings of the federal right to privacy in the United States.

Increasingly, our private lives seem to be happening inside glass houses, with less reason to believe there aren’t people watching.

In our cars, we are literally behind glass, zooming around town going about our lives. We have reason to believe the government isn’t tracking our movements, in no small part because the Supreme Court has ruled that long-term law enforcement tracking of a vehicle without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

But in Council Bluffs — and increasingly across the metro area, Iowa and the rest of the country — there’s also reason to wonder.

Last year, the Council Bluffs Police Department installed “a couple dozen” cameras in intersections across town. The department declined to specify exactly how many and which intersections, presumably so nefarious actors couldn’t plan routes to avoid them.

These cameras read license plates and look for specific vehicles sought by law enforcement, such as those reported stolen or tagged in an Amber Alert.

Police Capt. Todd Weddum told the Nonpareil that since the cameras went up, recovering stolen vehicles has been “like shooting fish in a barrel.” Mayor Matt Walsh said more than $1.9 million in stolen property was recovered in the first 16 months of operation.

That’s excellent news for those property owners, and it’s good police work.

A recent report by The Gazette found that similar cameras are being installed elsewhere in Iowa. They’re also deployed elsewhere in the Omaha metro area, although our big neighbor to the west has pumped the breaks on them within city limits after a lengthy debate earlier this year.

With the success Council Bluffs has seen, what’s the opposition? In a word, privacy.

The deployment to automated license plate readers is a mass surveillance scheme in which everyone’s personal movements in their vehicle is logged so it’s available for law enforcement to query.

While this means officers can go back in time to search for cars matching the description in a serious crime like a murder or kidnapping, it also means there’s a database showing at least roughly where you’ve been in town in recent weeks that police can access without a warrant.

Council Bluffs is keeping files not needed for an investigation for 30 days. The ACLU of Iowa recommends law enforcement not keep them longer than a week.

While the success of the cameras is undeniable, we hope so too is the realization that such a tool can be abused. Adequate safeguards, including more frequent purging of data, are needed.

This editorial first appeared in the Daily Nonpareil on December 16, 2023. It was distributed by The Associated Press.