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On the outer rim of a Home Depot parking lot in West Berlin, N.J., a group of more than 20 people — many of them senior citizens — did their part to fight Big Brother in the searing August sun.

“It got your license plate number!” shouted one man, pointing to a black, Flock brand solar-powered license plate reader above him and then to various cars in an Oprah-like manner, albeit at a slower clip. “They’re watching you! And You!”

The camera also captured the make, model, and any bumper stickers on passing vehicles going through the shopping plaza’s main entry and exit point, whether they went to Home Depot or not, someone else rattled off. Not to mention all the police-operated license plate readers dotting the region.

Waiting for the light to turn, one driver clearly isn’t buying the “surveillance state” claims. He tells the organizers their phones are already listening, lifting his for emphasis, and flipping them the bird as the line of cars begins to move again.

Michael Cannon, 72, understands that response, but insists these cameras are different.

“This is the freedom to travel,” he said over honks of support. “I can leave my phone at home. I don’t have to shop at Amazon. I don’t have to surf the internet. I choose to use them and I realize I’m giving up some privacy.”

It’s not just that Flock cameras can capture a vehicle’s license and other details, critics say. That information goes into a much-touted national database, which is fed by hundreds of local police departments in every state but Alaska. What’s more, Flock is not the only player in the market.

Automated license plate readers from Motorola Solutions, Axon, Avigilon, Neology, Leonardo, and Genetec are already peppered across the Jersey Shore, the Cherry Hill Mall, and shopping plazas across New Jersey. Major retailers including Lowe’s, Walmart, and Ulta Beauty have embraced the technology, citing loss prevention and employee safety as the driving force. And a majority of New Jersey’s law enforcement agencies have been using the technology since at least 2023, with a $10 million funding boost from then-Gov. Phil Murphy.

The “surveillance state,” say the technology’s harshest critics, is already here and rapidly expanding with a patchwork of regulations people are only now beginning to understand.

But at the Home Depot, Adam Sheridan tried to convince passing drivers it doesn’t have to be this way.

Sheridan is an organizer with the nascent group DeFlock South Jersey, which formed over the summer as the technology was subject to a flurry of investigative pieces, from local outlets like NJ.com to national publications including the New York Times. The South Jersey group is part of an effort to regulate and limit the growing assortment of automatic license plate readers. Everyday people are filing records requests, planning boycotts of retailers using the technology, and courting elected officials across the political spectrum, urging them to introduce bills regulating the technology.

“We’re trying to educate people,” Sheridan said of the group’s efforts. “They don’t know that this surveillance system is being built without their knowledge or their consent and we have found that when you tell people, they don’t like it.”

The growing pushback has made for strange bedfellows. Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has railed against Flock. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave the order last month to remove the readers, regardless of brand, from state right-of-ways. And in Pennsylvania, bipartisan legislation was introduced last month to protect data collected and establish guardrails against misuse.

Progressives like Sheridan see the collective concern and outrage as a boon to their cause.

“There really is a lot of alignment between very vastly different people and that’s unusual,” he said. “We can go and talk to a Republican legislator and say your voters care about this and then we can go to a Democratic politician and say the same thing.”

High-profile cases of abuse

One of the reasons Flock has received the brunt of criticism in the license plate reader backlash is because of a number of incidents where the technology was abused or misused.

Three former Georgia deputies, for example, were arrested for stalking people with the cameras.

Then there are the legal concerns, including whether the technology can help authorities circumvent the laws of neighboring states. Tech outlet 404 Media reported that police in Texas used Flock to track a woman who left the state to self-administer an abortion. While Texas prohibits almost all abortions, police were able to tap into Flock data in states where abortion is legal because of that national network.

The quandaries are not limited to Flock.

Immigration enforcement is another area where policies and safeguards can change from camera provider, to state, to police department, to private business.

Flock says it does not contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but clients in states like New York have allegedly used license plate reader data on ICE’s behalf.

For its part, New Jersey limits how state and local law enforcement assist immigration authorities and Flock says it has its own guardrails, requiring out-of-state agencies to confirm that they’ll comply with state law before receiving license plate data. Yet retailers set their own policies on when data can be shared with local and federal law enforcement.

People like Sheridan, someone who organizes for progressive causes in South Jersey, worry about the use of the technology under the current political climate. Even so, he’s encouraged by the criticism the technology has received across the political spectrum.

“We think that people on the right should also be concerned about it because Donald Trump won’t be the president forever,” he said. “There will be a Democratic president, and we don’t think that that president should have these powers either.”

Privacy advocates also urge critics to look beyond Flock and consider how license plate reader technology is being used by other companies and paired with other surveillance tools.

Motorola Solutions didn’t respond to a list of questions, but the American Civil Liberties Union reports it also offers a searchable national database of vehicle information captured by its cameras.

And Leonardo, as first reported in 404 Media, is rolling out sensors to their license plate readers that would capture “unique identifiers” of phones and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in cars. The company said in a statement that this is a separate product that can be paired with their license plate readers and all that information is kept in the end users’ own database.

Critics concede this is all a lot to take in. Yet they hope to tap into the sudden interest in license plate readers and replicate some of the data center bans in New Jersey. Though license plate readers are already ubiquitous, privacy advocates believe a mass mobilization could push for regulation.

A technology used statewide

License plate readers have been around for a long time.

In New Jersey, the Office of Attorney General has led efforts to regulate the technology since at least 2010. The latest tweaks to regulation came out of the office in 2022, mandating annual audits of law enforcement agencies using the technology; requiring license plate reader coordinators to improve oversight and information sharing; and cutting the time these departments can keep data and records from cameras from five to three years.

By the time the first statewide audit was published in 2024, 517 law enforcement agencies were already using the technology, including the New Jersey State Police, NJ Transit Police Department, and various county prosecutor’s offices. The latest report auditing the use of the technology, found 523 law enforcement agencies are using license plate readers. There are about 530 law enforcement agencies in the state, according to NJ.com.

And while agencies are told to report significant violations and citizen complaints — there were none listed for 2025 — information regarding how many cameras agencies have or how often they’ve been used in investigations is not provided.

Much of what’s known about license plate readers is coming from the companies themselves, with many of the service providers remaining rather tight-lipped.

In its more recent “impact census,” Flock reported its technology supported more than 1 million criminal investigations in 2025 across 700 law enforcement agencies nationwide, helping locate more than 10,000 missing persons. The company also claims more than 40% of its customers used Flock in more than half the cases that resulted in the recovery of a stolen car.

The Cherry Hill Police Department, however, is careful to not to overemphasize the technology’s role in solving crimes.

“In nearly every case where a reader mattered, it gave detectives a direction and the case was then built by corroborating that lead through other evidence: video, physical evidence, witness accounts, forensics,” said the department’s Capt. Sheldon Bryant.

A reader can offer a lead, he said, but proving the crime is still up to law enforcement.

The department has contracted with Flock for the last two years. Bryant highlighted several instances where the township’s 10 readers identified vehicles connected to crimes committed in and out of the township, which led to arrests.

A shooting investigation in Camden last January led authorities to a vehicle in Cherry Hill and just last month, a shooting in Cherry Hill led authorities to New York, according to the department. Cherry Hill Police obtained a warrant in the latter incident and a Flock reader picked up the vehicle’s license plate in New York, leading to an arrest.

In the last year, Cherry Hill’s system generated 2.2 million alerts, the overwhelming majority being expired registration and suspended plates — the department doesn’t use the readers to run enforcement sweeps on those. The alerts connected to criminal activity are far smaller, Bryant said. In the same year the department received alerts for about 800 stolen plates, 212 stolen vehicles, and 15 missing persons.

Many critics of license plate readers argue more granular data from individual law enforcement agencies on how they use the technology would aid in transparency.

How many people are being recorded to try to capture a select few, they ask. An oft-quoted statistic from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been studying new surveillance technology for more than 30 years, noted that less than 1% of cars scanned are connected to a crime, but that’s from research looking at data from 2016 and 2017.

At the inaugural DeFlock South Jersey organizing meeting, this statistic drew denouncements from the crowd.

“I know there’s some benefits but it’s not up to us to prove we didn’t commit a crime,” said a Howell Township resident named Joe afterward. He’s a registered Republican who declined to give his last name to preserve his privacy — a common stance among the group. “I’m driving past these all the time, I shouldn’t be surveilled in case something happens.”

Fighting the warrant loophole

Consider this: Police want to stick a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car. Law enforcement would have to get a judge to sign off on a warrant in order to do so and they would only be able to track an individual’s movements going forward.

Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said license plate reader technology inverts that system by collecting sensitive data all the time.

“Not only is it like skipping the judge, it’s skipping the judge and going back in time and putting a GPS device on a car 30 days ago,” Guariglia said.

The amount of time license plate readers keep that information varies by company and law enforcement agency. Amid backlash, Flock cut its retention period last month from 30 to seven days. Critics looking for greater regulation feel retention should be uniform across companies and shorter still.

One of the many tactics DeFlock South Jersey aims to take is pushing legislation that forces agencies to delete captured data after 48 hours unless it is needed as evidence. The suggested bill language promoted by the ACLU, also requires other law enforcement agencies to request access to license plate data collected by another entity. The asking agency would have to agree not to further share the data, unless required by law, or have a warrant.

Republican Sen. Michael Testa (Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland) plans to introduce legislation for license plate reader guardrails this month, though the text has yet to become available.

“The legislation that I will be introducing will establish commonsense protections for law-abiding citizens while still allowing law enforcement to use this technology to catch dangerous criminals,” he said in July.

Back at the organizing meeting, held at the South County Library in Winslow, attendees looked over drafts of the suggested legislation and headed to DeFlock.org — not affiliated with DeFlock South Jersey. The website is an open-source project that flips the script on license plate readers. Volunteers submit the locations of cameras across the country, regardless of brand, despite the name.

Many in the room were already acquainted with the app, having sent in tips themselves. Sheridan floated the idea of a license plate reader “scavenger hunt” as a potential event to raise awareness. Boycotting retailers that use the cameras was also floated as an idea.

Joe, the Republican attendee from Howell, doesn’t mind the cameras on private businesses. Still, as Sheridan hoped, Joe left the meeting ready to take action. He’s stayed in touch with DeFlock South Jersey in the weeks since and they’re coordinating a possible meeting in Howell, Sheridan said.

Despite the technology’s ubiquity in South Jersey, Sheridan feels regulation is within reach because people like Joe are joining the fight.

“Not to be corny about it but this is an American value,” said Sheridan. “The ‘don’t tread on me’ stuff is sort of in our DNA as Americans, the government doesn’t get to watch me everywhere I go.”