EFF says San Francisco's ALPR safeguards fall short

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called San Francisco's new policy for its automated licence plate reader network inadequate, arguing that it does not change what the cameras are for. In a post published on 29 September, the group said the announced safeguards will do nothing to stop the harms the technology is already producing.

What the policy does not require

The central complaint is judicial oversight. There is no warrant requirement before an officer searches stored ALPR data, and the foundation is blunt that an incident number or a computer-aided dispatch reference is not authorisation from a judge. Without a warrant, officers can search the movements of people who have done nothing wrong, and the group expects that some will.

The policy also carries no deadline for deleting ALPR data. The only clock attached to it gives the city 30 days to move data from the vendor's servers onto its own. The EFF's point is that moving data is not deleting it, and that whether Flock Safety or the police department holds the files, the result is a permanent record of where people drive, worship, work, organise, seek care and spend time with the people they love. It notes that New Hampshire requires deletion within three minutes and that Flock itself has cut its default retention to seven days.

Better audit logs, the group adds, are not an answer either. They can flag abuse only after a search has happened, which is too late to undo the disclosure of someone's location. The policy does not even oblige officers to explain, in their own words, why they are searching the stored data.

The harms the EFF points to

The post lists the failures the group says are structural rather than accidental: innocent drivers stopped after erroneous plate matches, officers using Flock systems to track people they know, and data reaching immigration enforcement and being used to deport people. It stresses that the problem is not one vendor, naming Flock Safety, Motorola and Axon, and notes that communities across the country have weighed the trade-off and ended their contracts.

Our opinion

San Francisco's mistake is treating a network of cameras as a paperwork problem. Once a city buys the ability to reconstruct where every car went, the interesting question stops being who is allowed to look and becomes why the archive exists at all. A warrant requirement would help and a deletion deadline would help more, but the EFF is right that neither turns the system into something the public asked for. The reference points it reaches for are telling: three minutes in New Hampshire, seven days as Flock's own default. Both are shorter than San Francisco's policy permits, and both come from places that accepted the same technology. That is not a radical standard. It is the floor, and the city is still below it.