In San Jose, the daily drive has turned into a courtroom battle. Three local motorists are suing the city and the San Jose Police Department over a sweeping rollout of nearly 500 Flock Safety license plate readers, arguing the cameras have quietly built a searchable map of where people travel that officers can tap without a warrant.
The plaintiffs say the system constantly captures plates and keeps the images long enough for police to reconstruct lawful trips to work, places of worship and medical appointments, effectively turning everyday driving into a detailed log of private life. They want a judge to sharply restrict how the database can be searched and to slash how long those images stick around.
What the new lawsuit says
The class action, organized by the Institute for Justice and filed this week, was brought by three drivers who argue San Jose and the SJPD have enabled warrantless searches of Flock’s database. One plaintiff is named Tony Tan, and the Institute’s lead attorney on the case is Michael Soyfer, according to NBC News.
The complaint asks a judge to require that most Flock images be deleted within 24 hours, unless police first obtain a warrant. Failing that, the plaintiffs want courts to mandate warrants before agencies search historical plate records at all. They say those limits are needed to stop what they describe as mass, retrospective surveillance of routine life on the roads.
How big the network is
City records show San Jose has deployed roughly 474 Flock cameras. In March, the City Council voted to cut the default retention period from one year to 30 days as part of a package of new safeguards. The council also restricted where cameras can be placed and tightened access rules, according to San José Spotlight.
Independent reporting has found that the network generates hundreds of millions of plate reads every year, a sheer volume that civil rights groups say supercharges the privacy risk. Earlier coverage by KQED highlighted just how many scans the system produces.
Audit logs show frequent searches
Public filings and audit documents cited in prior litigation put some numbers behind those concerns. A verified complaint filed by the ACLU and EFF says San Jose police searched their automated license plate reader database 261,711 times between June 5, 2024 and June 17, 2025, and that sharing with partner agencies meant the data was queried millions of times during that span. The complaint is publicly available.
Those figures are central to the argument that large-scale, warrantless lookbacks into drivers’ movements amount to an unreasonable intrusion on privacy under California law.
Relief sought and legal strategy
The drivers are asking the court to prohibit warrantless searches going forward and to force San Jose to purge most stored images quickly, a remedy they say would blunt the system’s dragnet effect. Their legal team points to other ALPR cases around the country, and the lead attorney has already appealed a prior Norfolk ruling that upheld the constitutionality of Flock searches, according to NBC News.
Civil liberties advocates say a strong ruling in San Jose could set a precedent that reshapes how departments nationwide rely on vendor-operated plate databases. In essence, the case asks how easy it should be for government to look back through weeks of a person’s travels without ever seeing a judge.
What San Jose and Flock say
City officials, for their part, defend the cameras as a critical investigative tool and say they have already built in guardrails. Mayor Matt Mahan and police leaders have described the system as essential for quickly finding suspects and vehicles tied to serious crimes, while the city attorney has argued that privacy protections are embedded in the program, as reported by San José Spotlight.
Flock, the vendor, says its transparency portals and agency controls allow customers to manage data sharing and comply with state law. In public statements, the company has portrayed its technology as a crime-fighting tool that cities can tune with local rules.
Regional pushback and policy changes
San Jose is not alone in wrestling with these cameras. Nearby Mountain View recently shut off its Flock devices after discovering evidence of unauthorized out-of-state access, and Santa Clara County supervisors voted to restrict the sheriff’s use of certain camera feeds.
Legal stakes
At stake is more than just one city’s policy. California’s ALPR Privacy Act and broader constitutional privacy protections sit at the heart of the ACLU and EFF’s arguments, which contend that routine, retrospective searches without judicial oversight violate the state constitution.
If a judge agrees, the ruling could force cities across California to adopt stricter warrant rules or shorter retention periods for plate data, and could trigger more litigation over how vendors access and share information across jurisdictions.
The San Jose case is still in its early stages. The city has not yet filed a public answer, and the court will set briefing and hearing deadlines in the months ahead. However it lands, the lawsuit is poised to test whether local officials can keep the data-heavy tools that have quietly become standard on city streets while responding to residents who say mass surveillance has gone too far into everyday life.
