Many Americans increasingly feel society is beginning to resemble the dystopian world George Orwell imagined — one where Big Brother is always watching.
The irony is that few would likely surrender the very technologies fueling those fears, or the conveniences that come with them.
A whopping 91% of American adults own a smartphone. A device that pinpoints your very location as often as it can, combining signals from GPS satellites, cell towers and nearby Wi-Fi networks.
But Americans’ privacy anxieties have evolved with technology.
After years of worrying about hacked webcams and smartphone tracking, automatic license plate reader cameras, or ALPRs, have become the latest target in the debate over how much surveillance is too much.
Law enforcement has been using license plate readers since the 1990s. In the mid-2010s, the technology became more advanced to identify not just license plates, but vehicle make, model, color and distinguishing characteristics.
This has helped law enforcement quickly locate abducted children, identify suspects connected to homicides and find stolen vehicles.
It was in the last decade or so that the public noticed companies like Flock Safety accelerating deployment by installing thousands of fixed cameras for police departments, neighborhoods and businesses, creating large interconnected networks — shifting the public conversation to concerns about mass surveillance.
Although many companies make the automatic license plate readers, Flock’s rapid expansion has made it the company most people associate with the technology, and, in turn, the focus of much of the public scrutiny.
“If you live in America, you will see our cameras everywhere; they’re easy to spot,” Flock Safety founder Garrett Langley said in a TED Talk last April. “But (with) your cell phone, you’re oblivious to all the tracking that exists online so you forget about it.”
Catching crime
In 2023, the Provo police department was dealing with a “series of lewdness events,” Capt. Brian Taylor, the department’s Operational Support Division commander, told the Deseret News.
A man in a white truck would drive around, stop and talk to women and occasionally flash them from inside his vehicle.
“We always had incomplete or partial descriptions of that vehicle until someone told us that it had a very specific kind of toolbox in the bed,” he said. “We put that into Flock, and it popped up almost immediately.”
While Taylor understands the public’s privacy concerns, he argues that Flock’s narrowly focused AI searches can actually offer greater privacy protection “because we’re not having to interact with the wrong people.”
“So if I was looking for that lewdness suspect, and the description I had was a Nissan or maybe a Ford truck with a toolbox in the bed driven by an older gentleman, well, there’s a lot of those,” he added. “We would have to be pulling over and interviewing dozens of people about this subject until this technology.”
There have been incidents where an ALPR alert was reportedly outdated, and a vehicle was wrongfully pulled over, or a person was accused of a theft crime they didn’t commit because a law enforcement officer allegedly misused the surveillance system.
But Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd argued that before the days of license plate readers, if a theft was committed and the only identification they had was a car’s make, model and color, it’s likely that every car matching that description in the area would be stopped.
“It makes investigations more efficient. It makes us more accurate too,” he told the Deseret News, echoing what Taylor said regarding the benefits of precision.
The Salt Lake City Police Department uses an ALPR system from Motorola Solutions. Unlike Flock, which allows retained data to be stored for up to 30 days, Salt Lake City’s data is stored for the max nine months.
Retention periods can vary by system and state law. Utah law sets nine months as the maximum. The law also limits when officers can access ALPR information and prohibits using ALPR data for civil immigration enforcement.
Redd said their surveillance system is used in robberies, aggravated assaults, homicides and fatal hit-and-run investigations. They were able to apprehend a man in Wyoming in connection to a motel homicide that took place in Salt Lake City with the help of the ALPRs.
He also said that another agency warned SLCPD that a man living out of state was allegedly traveling to Utah to harm former members of his church congregation. An ALPR detected his vehicle entering Utah, allowing law enforcement to stop him.
The systems appear to be having a deterrent effect, too.
One of San Francisco’s “most notorious criminals” recently went so far as to declare that crime is “over with” because you can’t get away with anything anymore, according to the Manhattan Institute. (WARNING: Graphic language in link).
Data colonialism?
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck said in a recent TED Talk that there are more than 100,000 license plate reader cameras across the nation that are actively recording every move you make in your vehicle.
“America’s days as a British colony may be long over, but we have slid into a new form of colonialism, not at the hands of foreign powers and plantation owners and trading companies, but at the hands of tech companies and government agencies. ... Data colonialism,” she said.
It’s a common comparison made among those who argue these cameras violate the Fourth Amendment by taking away a citizen’s right to privacy.
It’s a reason why an Alabama software engineer named Will Freeman created a website, dubbed DeFlock, that tracks where Flock cameras are set up around the country.
“Telling your neighbors where the cameras are is among the oldest of American instincts: the refusal to be governed in the dark,” Connor Boyack, president of the libertarian think tank Libertas Institute, said in an article last month.
He then quoted Benjamin Franklin:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
If the American Revolution had its tea, the surveillance age has utility poles.
Across the country, some opponents have decided that if Big Brother is watching, the solution is apparently to take away his camera. The videos of masked vigilantes sawing down or disabling or even crashing their car into license plate readers seem endless.
The ALPRs have also drawn unusual bipartisan scrutiny, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle questioning whether the crime-fighting benefits outweigh concerns about government surveillance and privacy.
Utah 3rd District Rep. Mike Kennedy posted on X his opposition to the growing number of cameras across the nation:
“Flock cameras have no business tracking law-abiding citizens, and I stand in clear opposition to their spread across our country. We must oppose even the slightest erosion of the constitutional protections that built this Republic, and we cannot allow quiet government overreach to become the norm.”
Can safety and privacy coexist?
But Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, claims that the crime-fighting benefits of Flock and other mass-surveillance technology substantially outweigh the privacy and abuse risks, and that critics focus too heavily on hypothetical or relatively rare abuses while discounting crimes the technology may help solve or prevent.
While it seems a regular occurrence to see articles about law enforcement officers abusing ALPR surveillance footage to spy on women, the technology’s supporters say abuse is rare.
Hanania argues that the documented abuses are small compared with the claimed benefits, and that “these are all rogue actors, and they have been punished in cases where there is sufficient evidence that they’ve committed crimes, indicating that none of these instances are part of a larger plot to deprive large numbers of citizens of their rights.”
Redd told the Deseret News that the SLCPD hasn’t had any incidents of abuse, and that the department is currently working with city leaders on an ordinance for the technology, including regular audits and a prohibition on using ALPRs for facial recognition.
That way, he said, a balance can be established between allowing the department to use ALPRs and protecting “privacy and civil liberties.”
Neither Provo’s Taylor nor Salt Lake’s Redd dismiss the public’s concerns.
“We don’t want to live in a society where we are surveilled by the government in a way that’s abusive,” Redd said. “I think license plate readers are probably at a lower level than carrying our cell phones around. ... We’re not accessing any of that information unless we have a reason to access it, which would be criminal in nature.”