How License Plate Readers Track Your Every Move

Think about what it means for the police to track nearly everywhere you go in your car, even though you aren’t suspected of any crime. If that wasn’t bad enough, police are also sharing your whereabouts with law enforcement agencies across the country.

That’s what police departments are doing using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). The unregulated use of this technology has swept up, analyzed, and shared detailed information about the movements of millions of drivers. The good news is, communities are getting fed up and calling for guardrails.

How Do License Plate Readers Work and What Are Their Dangers?

ALPRs are devices that can be mounted on police cars, fixed on poles, or set on the roadside to scan the license plates of cars passing by. Unlike red light or speed cameras, which are at least theoretically triggered by violations, license plate readers record data on each and every vehicle regardless of the driver’s conduct.

They capture, at minimum, the license plate number of a car as well as the date, time, and location, and often other characteristics including make, model, color, roof racks, and stickers.

License plate readers have been around for decades, but today’s technology allows law enforcement throughout the country to aggregate, analyze, and share much greater amounts of drivers’ data and even predict where people will go in the future based on their past travel behaviors. Widespread adoption of the cameras and few legal limits on their use and data retention allow for the creation of detailed movement records, revealing where we go to work, who we meet, which healthcare providers we visit, which protests we attend, and which places of worship we frequent. Such warrantless surveillance undermines our constitutional protections, in particular our rights to freedom of association, speech, religion, and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments.

Vendors like Flock specialize in enabling the most extreme forms of data sharing, removing any semblance of local control. In Syracuse, for example, when police “inadvertently” opted in to data sharing, officers from across the country searched Syracuse drivers’ information 4.4 million times between June 2024 and July 2025, of which 2,097 were labeled as immigration-related.

The consequences of this data sharing can be devastating. In Texas, police used out-of-state ALPR data to track down a woman they believed had self-administered an abortion. In Denver, audit logs show law enforcement searched the city’s data on behalf of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over 1,400 times between 2024 and 2025. And in California in June of 2025, law enforcement agencies shared ALPR data with ICE over 100 times, in direct violation of state law.

How Are New Yorkers Fighting Back?

In communities across the state, people are organizing to prevent and cancel contracts with ALPR companies that retain and share their data. Successful pushback against Flock contracts has happened in Syracuse, Scarsdale, Poestenkill, Saranac Lake, Ithaca, Tompkins County, and Pine Plains.

In Troy this March, residents succeeded in convincing the City Council to stop payments to Flock, though the mayor then called a state of emergency in order to keep the license plate readers funded and turned on. The Council filed litigation against the emergency order and the Flock contract renewal, and is now pursuing legislation that provides comprehensive ALPR guardrails.

And in Tompkins County, advocates successfully convinced the legislature to vote down the renewal of their Flock contract, by a 12-to-1 vote. Residents in Ithaca – Tompkins County’s largest city – successfully lobbied to terminate their contract with Flock in March. Alderperson Robin Trumble, who introduced the legislation, explained that Flock’s technology is out-of-line with Ithaca’s sanctuary city polices that protect immigrants.

In all of these places, it will be crucial to prevent another vendor from coming in and recreating the same harms under a different name and platform. Lawmakers must pass legislation to curtail ALPRs by significantly limiting when they can be used, dramatically reducing data retention periods, and prohibiting data sharing outside of New York without a judicial warrant.

Reining in License Plate Readers

The NYCLU crafted legislation (A.10808/S.9890) with our partners – currently under consideration in the state legislature – that would put the clamps on license plate readers and put guardrails in place to ensure they are no longer unchecked tools of mass surveillance.

First, the law restricts when law enforcement can use ALPR data. Valid uses include felony investigations and locating stolen vehicles and missing persons. License plate readers have become ubiquitous in part because they’re marketed as a panacea for too many purposes and have been misused countless times.

Second, police must delete data within 48 hours unless the data is used as evidence in an investigation or pursuant to a warrant. Longer retention periods allow for permanent surveillance and abuse, tracking an innocent person’s movements and creating the ability to predict where an individual may be in the future. They also increase the odds of federal overreach, access by ICE, sale of the data, or access by hackers – of particular concern given the FBI’s recent announcement of their plan to purchase nationwide ALPR data. 

Finally, the law places strict limits on data sharing. Vast sharing networks run by license plate reader companies open the door to abuse and endanger drivers. Our model legislation does not allow for out-of-state sharing without a judicial warrant.

These three prongs are coupled with strong oversight, accountability, and enforcement. The law would require police to keep detailed audit logs of all queries, provide for transparent public reporting, and allow people harmed by the use of ALPRs to sue for damages. These requirements will help ensure compliance – especially important given the track records of state law violations by police departments in California, Illinois, Washington, and Virginia.

Across the country and throughout New York, as people learn about the potential consequences of ALPRs, they are demanding sensible guardrails.

ALPR data can sometimes be helpful in solving crimes, but today’s technology has taken it far beyond its originally intended uses. Without proper safeguards, this surveillance can and will continue to be turned against people exercising their legal rights: seeking abortion or gender-affirming care, attending religious services, or advocating for what they believe in. The technology can also deliver law-abiding immigrants into ICE’s lawless hands.

New Yorkers will not stand for this technological assault on their rights. Our state and local leaders must pass legislation to protect everyone from the dangers of license plate readers.