The New York Times published a story this week about what has become a national conflict between privacy advocates and an Atlanta company called Flock Safety. Flock sells cameras known as automated license plate readers or ALPRs. The cameras photograph license plates, convert them into searchable data, and record when and where each vehicle was seen.
The Times story describes the controversy. “What sets Flock’s cameras apart is that they are connected, creating a vast, searchable national network — often surprising residents who didn’t realize their local governments had signed up for them and raising fears of Big Brother-style surveillance.” [1] The immediate controversy involves who can search that network. Questions have arisen about searches conducted for federal immigration authorities and about whether local agencies fully understood how widely their data could be accessed. Flock has responded by changing some of its data-sharing practices and emphasizing that local agencies control whether their data is shared. But the dispute has exposed a larger question that extends well beyond Flock: when thousands of local camera systems are connected, at what point does a collection of local law enforcement tools become a national surveillance network?
The tension between security and liberty is not new to the digital age. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized over a century ago that liberty, as that term is used in the U.S. Constitution, “denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right . . . to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” [2] The protection of what has come to be called a right to privacy has taken on a greater urgency with the advent of the internet age. In the criminal justice field, the technological innovation of ALPRs has triggered concerns not just about violations of privacy and other civil liberties but also with what happens to the data created from them.
There is nothing particularly concerning about a police officer watching you drive your car down a public street. Nor is there anything inherently troubling about a camera reading your license plate as you pass. But what if thousands of cameras create a record of where your car goes and when it was there? What if those records can be searched weeks later by police departments or other government agencies hundreds of miles away? At some point, a useful law enforcement tool risks becoming something different.
Critics of ALPR technologies suggest that the devices infringe on two aspects of privacy: location privacy and what legal scholars have termed informational privacy [3]. Location privacy is the idea that people have a right to privacy in their physical space. Informational privacy has to do with the right to access and control of personal information. Of additional concern is that the storage of data for many of these systems is not controlled by local officials who are accountable to the citizens they serve but by private corporations. Preservation and sharing of the recordings, the redacting of irrelevant material, and the application of public records laws to the captured data are all concerns for privacy advocates.
The benefit of this technology to law enforcement and the public in general is indisputable. ALPRs can help police recover stolen vehicles, identify fugitives, and help solve crimes as diverse as package theft to homicide.
- In February of this year, San Jose police arrested two men for killing a 17-year-old just two days after the murder with the help of ALPRs and stationary public safety cameras that identified the getaway vehicle.[4]
- A March 7 2026 shootout inside an Oakland nightclub killed two people and wounded at least five others. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, investigators identified a suspect through a combination of surveillance video, automated license-plate-reader data, dealership records, Instagram evidence, cellphone-location information and DNA.[5]
- Flock Safety’s website points to a 2024 Marietta, Georgia homicide that was solved and an arrest made within hours through the use of Flock’s products.[6] The company identifies many other examples with testimonials from its customers.[7]
The public-policy question is not whether ALPRs have value. They clearly do. The harder question is how to preserve those benefits without creating an effectively nationwide system capable of reconstructing the movements of millions of people who are suspected of no crime.
ALPR advocates respond that the information being collected is already exposed to public view. It seems paradoxical to argue that something public is or should be considered private. Common sense, they argue, suggests that there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy in something plainly visible to anyone in a public place. So, someone driving on a public street in a vehicle with a government mandated and issued license plate should not be able to complain about that plate number being captured by an ALPR mounted to a pole or to a passing law enforcement patrol vehicle. Police observers are not required to close their eyes to someone traveling in public view.
The issues with ALPR technology have gained new currency with the growth of Flock Safety’s camera installations across the continental U.S. Since the company’s founding in 2017, its products have spread to 49 states, with over 7,000 law enforcement agencies, 6,000 homeowners’ associations, and 1,000 businesses as customers.
The problem isn’t the cameras. The problem is failing to decide who may search the data, for what purpose, how long it is retained, who it may be shared with, and how those decisions are audited.
Lawmakers, police leaders, accreditation bodies, and technology companies should establish those rules before courts are forced to establish them after something goes wrong. The law has always struggled to keep pace with technology. That makes it especially important for law enforcement to establish sensible limits before it is required to do so.
We don’t have to choose between the benefits of ALPRs and personal privacy. But if we want both, we need rules that protect both.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/us/flock-cameras-can-track-every-car-in-america-police-love-them-citizens-dont.html
[2] Meyer v. State of Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923)
[3] In Whalen v. Roe, 429 U.S. 589 (1977), the Supreme Court described one aspect of privacy as the individual’s “interest in avoiding disclosure of personal matters.”
[4] https://www.sjpd.org/Home/Components/News/News/2685/262
[5] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/san-joaquin-county-man-charged-unlawful-possession-ammunition-connection-fatal
[6] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/solved-marietta-pd-leverages-flock-technology-to-swiftly-solve-homicide-case
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