San Jose drivers are suing the city and police department over massive surveillance network that tracks their every move

Three drivers in San Jose, California, have officially filed a class action lawsuit against their city and its police department, aiming to halt the massive surveillance network that keeps tabs on their daily movements, NBC News reported. The legal action, which is being spearheaded by the Institute for Justice, targets the deployment of nearly 500 cameras operated by Flock Safety.

These devices, which the company calls Automatic License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, are at the heart of a growing debate over how much privacy we can expect when we’re simply driving down the road. Flock Safety installs these cameras near prominent roads to record every vehicle that passes by, capturing the time and location of the trip. The images are then added to giant, searchable databases that use AI to help law enforcement identify exactly when and where a specific vehicle has traveled.

According to a transparency website operated by Flock, the San Jose Police Department currently has 474 cameras in operation. As of Wednesday, the system had detected almost 2.8 million vehicles within the previous 30 days alone. Officers were busy, too, having searched the database 4,099 times during that same period.

The legal argument here is rooted in the Fourth Amendment

The lawsuit highlights that thousands of government employees across the state have access to these California databases. Audit logs obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the San Jose data was searched 2.5 million times in the last six months of 2025, which averages out to about 13,500 searches every single day.

One of the plaintiffs, a software engineer named Tony Tan, explained that he simply can’t avoid the surveillance. He noted that a Flock ALPR is mounted right at the intersection he uses to leave or return to his home. He expressed worry that his license plate is being captured constantly, particularly because he participates in local activism and volunteers as a legal observer responding to potential immigration enforcement activity.

He raised a fair point about the future of this data, wondering what happens if that information gets into the wrong hands. Even if he’s doing nothing wrong, he’s concerned about the potential for future retaliation.

The Institute for Justice contends that the city’s use of this technology constitutes an unreasonable law enforcement search. Michael Soyfer, the lead attorney on the case, explained that these cameras can generate data on virtually every route a person takes when they leave their house. He pointed out that while the cameras might not follow you door to door, they generate enough data points to allow the government to piece together a lot about your life.

Privacy concerns are also heightened by the placement of these cameras. Soyfer mentioned that they have seen these devices in San Jose on the same blocks as hospice care facilities, immigration lawyers’ offices, and hospitals. These are places where people generally wouldn’t want to be monitored or surveilled by the government.

The city of San Jose has already acknowledged some of the backlash. Last month, the City Council voted to shorten the data retention period for the location information that Flock holds from one year down to just one month. However, the lawsuit is asking for much more. It wants the court to compel the city and the police department to delete all Flock images within 24 hours unless there is a warrant. If the court doesn’t go that far, the second-line request is for a mandatory warrant requirement for any access to the data.

A spokesperson for Flock Safety said in an email that the suit raises important questions, but they noted that courts have repeatedly found that using Flock devices is constitutional. They pointed to previous cases, including one from March in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, which found that license plate readers do not violate the Fourth Amendment because they take point-in-time photos of cars in public and cannot continuously track the movements of any individual.

The battle is far from over. While Flock has faced several lawsuits alleging Fourth Amendment violations, it has yet to be found culpable in court. The Institute for Justice previously brought a similar case on behalf of residents in Norfolk, Virginia, where a court found in favor of the city. Despite that, Soyfer said he simply disagreed with that decision and has appealed, hoping the Northern District of California might be more sympathetic to their arguments regarding mass surveillance.

For now, the debate over how much of our daily travel should be recorded by these cameras continues to intensify.