San Francisco Keeps Its License-Plate Cameras, Offering Only Weak Safeguards

San Francisco has decided to keep its Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) system, adopting a set of new "safeguards" instead of scrapping it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls those measures woefully inadequate: in its view, the announced policy does nothing to stop the actual harms this spying technology causes.

What's wrong with the cameras

According to EFF, innocent drivers are stopped and menaced over erroneous matches. Officers use the system to stalk current and former romantic partners. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taps the data and uses it for deportations. Promising harsher penalties for such abuse, the group argues, will not fix things: these are not isolated mistakes another policy can patch, but a direct consequence of a system that records everyone's movements and makes them searchable by police. Nor is the problem tied to one vendor — whether Flock Safety, Motorola, or Axon.

The policy's weak spots

EFF lists the flaws in the new rules. First, there is no warrant requirement to search stored data: an incident number or computer-aided dispatch (CAD) code is not judicial authorization, so officers can search location data without showing a judge probable cause.

There is also no deadline to delete data — only a 30-day deadline to move it from the vendor's servers to the city's. But moving is not deleting. Wherever the records sit, they remain a permanent log of where people drive, worship, work, organize, seek care, and spend time. By comparison, New Hampshire requires deletion within three minutes, and Flock itself has cut its default retention to seven days.

Finally, leaning on audit logs and transparency does not help: logs expose abuse only after a search has happened and cannot undo the disclosure of someone's movements. Worse, the new policy does not even require officers to state, in their own words, why they are searching the data — a rule that has helped surface abusive searches elsewhere.

EFF notes that many communities across the country have weighed the trade-offs and ended their contracts. San Francisco, the group says, is behind them and should do the same — end its use of ALPRs entirely.

Source: EFF Deeplinks