Imagine you’re preparing to drive home from a doctor’s appointment when a law enforcement officer approaches your vehicle, takes a photo of your car, and sends it to federal law enforcement, as well as local and state police to store for a year or more.

Now imagine that takes place every time you get in your car and go about your daily life. This, in effect, has been happening in Michigan due to the proliferation of unregulated automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). Proposed legislation aims to create a legal framework that sets common-sense guardrails in the state to ensure their use is not invasive and respects constitutional rights.

While ALPRs can be used for legitimate policing, the current lack of a governance framework means that a surprising amount of personal data is vulnerable to misuse or abuse. These plate readers work by automatically photographing your car and checking your plate number against a hotlist to search for stolen vehicles, outstanding warrants or persons needed for ongoing investigations. Authorities are then automatically notified if a match is found.

However, the photos and data collected aren’t just saved for the vehicles on the hotlist — they are saved for all drivers regardless of their record. This is all possible without a warrant.

The amount of data collected can be staggering. Officially, with each photo, authorities aim to capture the license plate number, the make, model and color of the vehicle, the date, time and location, and even vehicle owner registration information provided by the Secretary of State. In addition, photographs of the back of the car can capture images of passengers, bumper stickers and details of the surrounding area.

In the city of Taylor alone, 50 mounted cameras, along with 27 more vehicle-mounted ALPRs, scanned over 9 million plates per month. These cameras are now deployed across Michigan — along interstate highways, important intersections and many other locations. Taken together, authorities can use pictures from ALPRs mounted across at least 125 Michigan cities and counties to map a person’s daily movements, revealing where they live, work, worship, receive medical care, or otherwise spend their time.

The use of these new tools already extends beyond traditional law enforcement agencies to include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Most ALPRs in Michigan are provided by Flock Safety, which is likely used by CBP. An investigation by 404 Media found that these agencies had access to 80,000 cameras nationwide, and local agencies have searched ALPR databases for immigration-related reasons, sometimes in collaboration with state or local police. Expanding the tools of surveillance to federal immigration enforcement agencies that are routinely violating constitutional rights and ignoring court orders could further erode democratic institutions, increase the risk of wrongful imprisonment and leave our communities less safe.

And mistakes do happen. Over a six-month investigation, CBS found more than a dozen cases when ALPRs, sometimes in combination with human error, led to wrongful stops, along with cases when the technology was abused. In New Mexico, an ALPR that mistook the number 2 for the number 7 ended up with an innocent 12-year-old girl in handcuffs.

In Detroit, police handcuffed a mother and put her and her 2-year-old autistic child in a squad car, impounding her car for over three weeks after using ALPRs to mistakenly tie her vehicle to a shooting two miles away.

Michigan lacks a comprehensive legal framework governing the use of ALPRs that could put innocent people in dangerous situations and betray data privacy.

To address this lack of oversight, Republican Rep. Doug Wozniak and Democratic Rep. Jimmie Wilson Jr. have partnered to sponsor House Bill package 5492 and 5493 that would clarify when and how ALPR data can be used across the state. Among the bills’ most important provisions are the requirements for judicial warrants to access camera information for criminal cases, the limiting of data retention to 14 days and public reporting on their use.

Michigan has a clear roadmap with at least 16 other states already enacting similar legislation and it’s time for lawmakers to follow.