Flock Calls ALPR Information "Wholly Irrelevant" to Lawsuit About Policy on ALPR Information

The three California class actions over Flock’s automated license plate readers are now consolidated as In re Flock Group Inc. Automated License Plate Reader Litigation, No. 3:26-cv-02375-VC (N.D. Cal.), before Judge Vince Chhabria.^[1] In the fight over how much of its data Flock has to hold onto, the company has landed on a strange argument: its cameras capture “over 130 data fields,” but those fields are, Flock says, “wholly irrelevant” to a lawsuit about the data its cameras capture.

The line comes from an April letter by Flock’s lawyers, written to fend off the suggestion that Flock had let evidence slip away. To justify keeping a smaller slice of data going forward, Flock told the plaintiffs that most of what it collects doesn’t matter:

… Flock’s ALPR system captures over 130 data fields, the overwhelming majority of which—fields relating to bumper stickers, roof racks, window stickers, vehicle pose, and the like—are wholly irrelevant to a lawsuit that concerns whether Flock posted an adequate usage and privacy policy and whether federal or out-of-state law enforcement agencies had unauthorized access to the ALPR data of California public entities.

California doesn’t carve out a “doesn’t matter” exception. Its ALPR law defines the regulated information about as broadly as language allows:

(b) “Automated license plate recognition information,” or “ALPR information” means information or data collected through the use of an ALPR system.

If Flock’s system collects it, it’s ALPR information — plates, colors, the contents of bumper stickers, and whatever the other hundred-odd fields hold. And California requires every ALPR operator to publish a usage-and-privacy policy spelling out what it collects, why, how it keeps that data accurate, and how it secures it. (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.90.51.)

In February, a California appeals court held in Bartholomew v. Parking Concepts that running ALPRs without a compliant policy is itself the harm — no need to prove your data was ever misused or shared. Flock’s exposure doesn’t hinge on catching it red-handed but on whether its published policy completely and accurately describes what the system does.

It doesn’t. Flock’s published License Plate Reader Policy (last updated November 2025) lists eight kinds of data: a plate image, a vehicle image, vehicle characteristics like color and make, the plate number and state, and the date, time, and camera location. In court, Flock admits to more than 130 — and in its settlement proposal it agreed it “would not deny that it collects other information, such as bumper stickers and roof racks.” Flock admits collecting this ALPR information that appears nowhere in its policy.

That gap is enough to establish the violation, but it still can’t measure it. The plaintiffs also bring privacy claims, including the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, and those turn on how offensive the surveillance is. Offensiveness is judged by the manner, scope, and aggregation of what’s collected, not by whether any single detail was visible from the street.

Which is exactly why “wholly irrelevant” is posturing. Flock wants the court to agree these fields don’t belong in the case, so it only has to keep and hand over a narrow set. One group of plaintiffs’ lawyers, trying to save some data, has been willing to take that deal. If the deal goes through, Flock gets to produce tidy “samples” that will almost certainly leave out the “offensive” parts.

We know Flock users have run searches for things like “star of david” and “red corvette with cross sticker on rear window”. If I were a court considering “offensiveness”, I’d want to hear about a database of religious expressions being built by snapping pictures of people headed to the grocery store and subsequently sold to the government.

Flock says preserving what it collects on Californians would mean “petabytes of data that no one could use.” Petabytes is the scale of a system that photographs ordinary people running errands and records a hundred-some attributes of each car, over and over, across the state. Flock wields the amount of data it collects as a defense. But the bigger the amount of data collected, the more offensive the surveillance, and the more it’s worth, in real judgment dollars.

But that offensive defense is a misdirect. Flock won’t produce even a plain account of what the fields are and how the search tools work. It brushes off requests for “data dictionaries and data maps” as pointless. Most of the decade of data Flock collected is already rotated out on a thirty-day-to-one-year clock; transient petabytes continue to cycle through Flock’s system, but that doesn’t preclude the question of how much and what types of data have already been collected, sold, and deleted.

Looking at the policy itself, it is conspicuously selective about accuracy — another element required by California law. The policy promises that low-confidence plate reads aren’t passed along, and concedes plate translation “may be incomplete or inaccurate” but says nothing about the accuracy of the other fields — including color, which it collects and sells.

In October 2025, a Volusia County, Florida woman spent more than two weeks in jail after Flock got the color of her car wrong. (For what it’s worth, Flock boasts that its system can tell a motorcycle from a semitruck about 92.3% of the time.)

The plaintiffs, for their part, are still trying to figure out who runs the case; the competing motions go before the court on June 25. The split is basically the one above: triage down to the data that identifies class members and move fast, or fight for the broader fields that show how far the system actually reaches.

The firm pushing hardest to let the broader fields go is, as it happens, the same one whose signature courtroom win helped establish that personal data has real value as data. Reasonable people can disagree about what to save when the clock (and the legal bill) is running. But trading away the most revealing evidence to lock in a quicker, smaller win may not be the best play.

The disclosure failure has always done double duty for Flock: hide what the system collects, and dodge enforcement when no one knows to ask. Now Flock wants it to pull a third shift — wall the undisclosed fields off from the one proceeding built to drag them into the light.

It’s genuinely a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.