San José Residents Sue City, Saying Flock Safety Cameras Allow ‘Mass Surveillance’

Residents are suing San José over its Flock Safety cameras, alleging that the city’s use of the license-plate reading technology creates an unconstitutional “mass surveillance system.”

The civil rights suit, filed in federal court on Wednesday, said the cameras allow the San José Police Department to monitor residents’ movements in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unlawful search and seizure, and asks a judge to require the city to delete most data the cameras capture after 24 hours.

“San José is operating nearly 500 license plate reader cameras connected with AI technology around the city to essentially spy on everyday people going about their business,” said Daniel Woislaw, an attorney with the Virginia-based Institute for Justice, which is representing the plaintiffs. “This kind of intrusive technology that collects basically a dossier on people on a rolling basis is a search, and therefore has to have some constitutional guardrails around it.”

The three San José residents bringing the suit have alleged that the city’s system of readers conducts constant monitoring, allowing the SJPD and other agencies to track residents’ whereabouts without a warrant or probable cause of a crime.

They’re seeking a class-action status on behalf of all city dwellers who have or will have their license plate data recorded.

“No officer ever has to establish probable cause, swear to the facts in a warrant application, or await the approval of a judge,” the suit said. “Officers can run searches based on a hunch, idle curiosity, or even personal animus. Around the country, officers have been caught using [automated license-plating reader] databases to stalk their ex-partners, monitor protestors and even track down a woman who reportedly had an abortion.”

Wednesday’s legal challenge follows a similar state-level suit brought against San José by civil liberties groups in the fall, alleging their use of Flock Safety cameras violates the California constitution.

It comes as dozens of municipalities across the U.S. terminate or rethink contracts with Flock, a leading company selling the technology, over growing privacy and legal concerns stemming from its data-sharing system.

Data sharing is an advertised part of Flock’s offerings — the company offers contracted agencies multiple options to share data with other customers, including “National” and “State” lookups, which share data between Flock Safety customers who opt in across the U.S., or only in the agency’s home state, respectively. Alternatively, customers can choose a 1:1 sharing option, which requires that they add agencies they would like to share data with individually.

City officials have said this can be helpful to follow a suspect’s vehicle movements between nearby jurisdictions. In recent months, though, some Bay Area cities have amended their controls around data sharing after discoveries that their records had been accessed by out-of-state agencies, including to aid in federal immigration enforcement activities in violation of local Sanctuary policies.

More than two dozen municipalities across the U.S. — including Santa Cruz and Los Altos Hills — have terminated contracts with Flock altogether. Others, like Oakland and San Francisco, have doubled down on their contracts, lauding the technology’s benefits to aid in investigations and even curb dangerous vehicle collisions.

But the San José residents represented in the suit say that the city’s more than 470 cameras have created a system of “mass surveillance.” Plaintiff Zhaocheng Anthony said in court documents that the system “reminds him of the Chinese surveillance state.”

“Pervasively tracking a person’s movements and then storing them in a government database … creates precisely the type of suffocating atmosphere of surveillance the Framers adopted the Fourth Amendment to prevent,” the suit reads. “Police no longer need to identify suspects in advance to place them under surveillance; they just surveil everyone instead.”

The residents say that Flock can create “vehicle journey maps” that can be traced to a driver, allowing the city to track residents’ routines, habits and outings, especially to sensitive locations like health care clinics, places of worship and protests.

In March, San José’s city council put restrictions on where the city can position cameras, including near reproductive health care facilities and places of worship; reduced the default data retention period from one year to 30 days; and added new documentation and authentication requirements for agencies requesting sharing access.

“The San Jose Police Department has robust, transparent policies in place to ensure that the information is not misused in any way, including policies that prohibit direct access to the data to private entities, out-of-state law enforcement agencies, or federal agencies,” City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood said in a statement. “Access to our ALPR system is tightly controlled and limited to authorized SJPD personnel only.”

SJPD said it conducted a review of internal and external searches in 2025, and found that “all searches were in compliance with department policy and California law.”