Why is a license plate reader is watching the library sidewalk?

Happy Sunday.

Arizona State has 20 Flock cameras on its Tempe campus. One of them sits on a pedestrian walkway in front of Noble Library, where cars barely go. The university has run them since 2022 and says the data goes only into investigations, only in public areas, and always alongside other evidence.

At least 75 colleges use Flock, according to a March report from the sports newsletter FOIAball. This week UW-Milwaukee told the company to remove its cameras and put bags over them in the meantime. UW Oshkosh police suspended use. Kent State ended its pilot in the spring, and officials wrote that for some people on campus the cameras produced the opposite of the intended feeling.

Most of the coverage you have read argues whether these cameras catch criminals or enable stalkers. Both are true, and both deserve the fight they are getting.

I want to argue a different point.

The Fourth Amendment protects the privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. That is the test the Supreme Court set in 1967 and still applies. The test has no fixed content. It moves with what people actually expect. And the Americans forming their expectations right now have been tracked by their parents since middle school and walk to class past a plate reader.

Four cameras in a town of 9,500

In Seneca, South Carolina, a police investigator typed his own plate into Flock for a Wall Street Journal reporter. Seconds later he had a map of everywhere he and his partner had driven past a camera in the previous 30 days, across three states. Another window on his screen showed departments as far away as Michigan searching Seneca's network while he talked.

Seneca has 9,500 residents and four cameras. Last month those four logged more than a million reads and 197,000 distinct vehicles.

Justice Sotomayor explained in a 2012 GPS case why a map like that is different from a single sighting. A complete record of where someone goes exposes their religious, political, professional and sexual life, because the destinations give it away. For a 20-year-old that means the apartment they keep visiting and the meeting they did not tell anyone about.

Those searches happen. Flock added keyword blocks this summer for immigration and reproductive-health searches, which tells you what the company was seeing in its own logs. ICE holds no Flock contract, and 404 Media still counted more than 4,000 immigration lookups routed through cooperative local police in under a year. Cornell students raised that exact concern about the seven cameras at the entrances to their campus, since many of their classmates are here on visas.

Driving was the first privacy an American kid got

Teenagers have less physical world than any generation before them. Malls closed by the thousands. One New Jersey mall bars anyone under 18 on weekends without an adult who is at least 23. A survey of 24,000 parents found roughly 60 percent of 17-year-olds still are not allowed to leave their neighborhood alone. The share of high school seniors who see friends weekly fell from 88 percent in the 1980s to 69 percent in 2024.

For generations the answer to all of that was a car. A license was the first door an American kid got that their parents were not behind.

Flock is a system for watching cars, which makes that particular door its entire business. And because plenty of teenagers drive something registered to a parent, the record of where a 17-year-old went sits under Mom's name.

On the ASU campus it is not even the car anymore. It is the sidewalk.

Parents normalized this first

The camera on the pole arrived after the one in the pocket.

Life360 $LIF ( ▼ 1.69% ) crossed 100 million monthly users in the second quarter, and the company says American users open the app about six times a day. A University of Michigan poll of 1,542 parents this year found 52 percent of them track their 18- to 25-year-old children, usually with location on all the time. One young woman told NPR that nearly everyone she knows tracks and is tracked by their parents, so it simply reads as normal.

Any parent who has watched a dot crawl home at one in the morning understands the appeal, and I am not going to argue with the dot.

But the two systems teach different lessons. The family app is something a kid agrees to, with people who love them, and it can be switched off at the dinner table. A plate reader never asks, keeps what it takes, and passes it to agencies the kid will never meet. Somebody raised on the first one has a much shorter distance to travel to accept the second.

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Reasonable is a moving target

Here is the mechanism that worries me, and it is the part the hearing coverage will skip.

Justice Alito flagged it in that same 2012 case. New technology shapes what people expect, and people may eventually reconcile themselves to the change "as inevitable." Once they do, the expectation stops being reasonable, and the constitutional protection that rested on it thins out.

The Court is holding a line on phones for now. In June it ruled 6-3 in Chatrie that police conduct a search when they obtain someone's stored phone location history, because people still expect that record to stay private. Your car's movements, assembled from 120,000 cameras, remain unsettled. The Institute for Justice argues that question before a federal appeals court this fall, on behalf of a Navy veteran and a home health aide in Norfolk, Virginia.

Eventually some court has to decide what a reasonable American expects on a public road. That answer depends on who is asked, and the honest version of my thesis is that it gets harder to win every year the cameras stay up.

Surveillance also changes behavior well before it changes law. After the 2013 Snowden disclosures, a study by Jon Penney found views of Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics dropped about 20 percent. Nobody was arrested for reading Wikipedia. People just got careful.

Students do not agree with each other

Plenty of young people are fighting this. Clemson students brought "Make Orwell Fiction Again" signs to the Oconee County hearing. In a Journal student forum, a Naval Academy midshipman wrote that his generation's defining experience of the government promising to keep them safe was a pandemic lockdown. An LSU junior told her campus paper she already feels bad for the kids coming after her.

The students on the other side make a serious case. One Claremont McKenna student who grew up in public housing wrote that in neighborhoods where witnesses are too frightened to talk, cameras are how the people terrorizing the block finally get caught. A Baylor student noted that mistaken eyewitnesses contributed to more than 700 known wrongful convictions since 1989, and a camera is a steadier witness than a scared one. In Asheville, the housing authority credits its cameras and a police partnership with cutting violent crime 38 percent this year against a five-year average, and the two council members who voted to keep Flock represent constituents in public housing.

Privacy is easiest to prize in a zip code where nobody steals your car. Any answer that ignores that is not a real answer.

Ask your school what the settings are

Wednesday's Senate hearing will be covered as cameras versus no cameras. The questions that decide this for young people are narrower. How many days does the data live? Flock dropped its default to seven, but existing customers keep whatever they had. Who else can search it? In Alpharetta, Georgia, WIRED found more than 2,000 agencies could. Did anyone vote? Usually not.

A lot of you sit on a university board, write checks to one, or have a kid moving into a dorm. That is more leverage than any protester has. Ask whether the school runs Flock, how long it keeps the record, and who it shares with.

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The locks have already failed

Then there is the question that should open Wednesday's hearing.

Flock has said its cameras hold images only briefly before sending them to the cloud. A hacking group called stegan0gram pulled one camera off a roadway and found otherwise: 27,321 video clips and 1.6 million images from 21 days on the device, with the key to the encrypted partition stored on the same camera. That one camera had logged about 50,200 vehicles and 11 people in three weeks. A researcher named Ben Jordan got into cameras he bought legally by pressing buttons on them, and reached live cameras over the open internet with no hacking involved. Flock's CEO thanked him, said the holes are patched, and said few cameras were affected. In Boston, an annual surveillance report found Flock improperly shared city vehicle data with outside agencies three days into a pilot.

Every safeguard in this debate is a setting. Retention windows, audit logs, keyword blocks, contract language about who gets access. Settings assume the system holds. A roadside camera, a live feed and a city pilot have each already shown it does not, and those are the failures somebody bothered to find and publish.

The rest of this argument gets decided by judges and city councils over the next decade. That part gets decided by whoever is trying hardest. We are compiling the most detailed record of American movement ever assembled, storing it on poles beside the road, and asking a private company's patch cycle to protect it. A stolen password is an afternoon of annoyance. A stolen map of where your daughter drove for a month is hers for life, and no council vote takes it back.

Stay curious 😎

- John