Surveillance

San Jose's 'Creepy' and 'Deeply Intrusive' ALPR Camera System Is Unconstitutional, a New Lawsuit Says

The city has created a network of nearly 500 cameras that routinely monitor innocent people as they go about their daily lives.

Jacob Sullum | 4.16.2026 4:50 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Tony Webster)

Five years ago, police in San Jose, California, began using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to record information about vehicles traveling through the city. The initial experiment involved four Flock Safety cameras at a single intersection. Today the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) has access to data captured by a network of 474 ALPR cameras that blanket the city, recording residents as they go about their daily lives.

More than 1,000 SJPD employees are authorized to search that information, which does not require a warrant, probable cause, or even individualized suspicion of involvement in criminal activity. Because San Jose shares its information, it also can be perused by people at nearly 300 other government agencies across California.

That "creepy" and "deeply intrusive" surveillance system violates the Fourth Amendment, the Institute for Justice argues in a lawsuit it filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. "Government employees search San Jose drivers' data thousands of times every day with almost no oversight, creating a situation that's ripe for abuse," warns Institute for Justice attorney Michael Soyfer.

The lawsuit involves three named plaintiffs, but it aims to represent a class consisting of "all San Jose residents who were drivers of vehicles" that have been photographed by the city's cameras during the last year or will be photographed in the future. The plaintiffs are seeking a court order that would require the SJPD to delete or block access to images and data collected by the cameras after 24 hours unless it has "a specific warrant based on probable cause" or invokes a recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.

The SJPD initially retained ALPR information for a year, paying Flock, which installs the devices and charges rent for them, an extra $300 per camera to store the data for that long. "There is no need for that information," the city's digital privacy officer conceded in 2024. "It is strictly what our attorney's office has decided is the current interpretation." That interpretation changed in response to a public outcry, and the SJPD currently keeps the data for a month, which is Flock's default.

Despite that concession, the city is still collecting a huge amount of information about the locations and itineraries of drivers. In 2024, the ALPR system recorded more than 360........

© Reason.com