Ticketer leaks photos and personal info of parking violators

A website flaw compromised the personal information of drivers ticketed by a private contractor.

UK Parking Control, a major ticketing firm, “is accused of revealing photographs of Brits' cars parked with number plates clearly to be read and in some cases the location revealed. In some images it's alleged that other details such as identification cards, shopping or belongings are clearly visible.”

Each ticket created by UKPC, which monitors 1,200 car parking locations nationwide, includes a link that pulls up a page with pictures of the vehicle taken by one of the company's ticketing operatives to illustrate why that particular penalty was issued.

One ticket recipient discovered a bug in the site that allows anyone ticketed to access thousands of digital photographs of other people's vehicles, just by tweaking values in the link.

"Photos of parked cars with number plates visible can in themselves cause privacy problems, as they can show where a driver has been. This is why numberplates are blurred out on Google Street View, for instance, and why only police and other authorised users are allowed access to number plate records generated by such systems as speed cameras."

Some images were reproduced on the Nutsville blog, which campaigns against the private parking enforcement industry in the UK.