SB 1013 Risks Normalizing Warrantless Mass Location Surveillance in California
SB 1013 is being sold as privacy reform for automated license plate readers, or ALPRs. Parts of it genuinely are.
The bill now requires public-agency searches to include a specific, plain-language purpose. It restricts default national sharing. It closes some legacy-contract loopholes by applying those protections to renewals and extensions.
Secure Justice fought for some of those changes, and Senator Sabrina Cervantes deserves credit for accepting them.
But the August 21 amendments changed the bargain in a much more fundamental way. The bill is no longer simply about putting guardrails around ALPR surveillance. It increasingly risks normalizing the surveillance architecture itself.
What ALPR actually does
Automated license plate readers are cameras paired with software that capture vehicle plates, timestamps, and location information. Those observations are fed into searchable databases.
The databases do not contain only suspected criminals.
They contain all of us.
People going to work. Visiting a doctor. Attending church. Driving to a political meeting. Visiting family. Going to a gun range. Seeing a therapist. Staying overnight somewhere government officials may find interesting later.
A single plate observation may seem mundane. Millions of them collected and searched together are not.
The August 21 amendments change deletion into preservation
This is the most consequential change in the bill.
The August 17 version required public agencies, subject to limited exceptions, to delete ALPR information held beyond 30 days.
The August 21 version removes that destruction command.
“As of January 1, 2027, a public agency shall, within 14 days, archive all ALPR information that has been held for more than 60 days unless it is retained in the evidence file of an active investigation or criminal proceeding or matches information on an authorized hot list.”
That wording matters.
The bill does not merely permit archival. When qualifying information has actually been held beyond the statutory trigger, the agency is directed to archive it.
And SB 1013 establishes no ultimate destruction deadline for that ordinary archived information.
Data minimization
Subject to narrow exceptions, government eventually had to delete historical ALPR information.
Data preservation
Information actually held beyond the statutory threshold is archived, with no ultimate destruction deadline supplied by the bill.
That is not a technical revision.
It is a philosophical reversal.
Under the earlier approach, California eventually required government to forget where innocent people had traveled.
Under the August 21 approach, California creates a framework for preserving those historical movements.
A warrant is not the same thing as deletion
SB 1013 contains one meaningful protection: archived ALPR data generally cannot be queried without a warrant from a California court.
That is better than unrestricted access.
But a warrant requirement answers only the question of when government may search the archive.
Information the government deletes cannot later be hacked, leaked, subpoenaed, repurposed, exploited by insiders, exposed by a vendor failure, subjected to future statutory amendments, or accessed by a future administration with very different priorities.
A warrant controls access.
Deletion eliminates the surveillance record.
The constitutional issue is bigger than a number of days
SB 1013 also sits awkwardly against the Supreme Court’s modern location-privacy cases.
Carpenter: seven days was already enough
In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that government access to seven days of historical cell-site location information constituted a Fourth Amendment search.
Importantly, the Court did not hold that anything shorter than seven days was constitutionally harmless. It simply did not need to identify the precise lower boundary.
Chatrie: the Constitution does not turn on a magic minimum
The Court’s 2026 decision in Chatrie v. United States makes reliance on a minimum-duration safe harbor even harder. The Court rejected the proposition that only a short period of historical digital location information necessarily falls outside Fourth Amendment scrutiny.
ALPR records and cell-phone location records are not identical technologies.
But the constitutional problem is closely related: modern surveillance technology enables government to infer deeply revealing facts by aggregating data points that may appear innocuous one at a time.
The mosaic problem
Courts increasingly confront the reality privacy advocates have raised for years: the whole can be constitutionally different from the sum of its individual parts.
A police officer seeing a car once on a public street is one thing.
A database capable of reconstructing that person’s movements across days, weeks, jurisdictions and agencies is another.
Government may learn where someone sleeps, whom they visit, where they worship, whether they repeatedly visit an oncology clinic, whether they attend protests, whether they spend nights at a romantic partner’s home, or whether they repeatedly cross paths with another person.
That is why the constitutional question cannot be reduced to whether an individual license plate was visible in public.
The more important question is what government can infer once millions of public observations become a searchable historical record.
Even Flock is moving toward shorter retention
The timing makes California’s policy choice even stranger.
On August 13, Flock Safety—the dominant ALPR vendor and hardly Secure Justice’s idea of a privacy organization—announced that it was reducing its recommended/default retention period from 30 days to seven days.
Flock paired that shorter period with an “Evidence Mode” allowing specific records needed for investigations to be separately preserved.
Secure Justice has been sharply critical of Flock. We do not cite the company as the final word on privacy.
But when even the surveillance vendor is moving from 30 days toward seven, California should not move from a proposed deletion requirement toward a framework that commands archival when data crosses the 60-day threshold.
Retention is not the bill’s only problem
DOJ oversight delayed until 2029
The bill’s substantive regime would operate for years before DOJ must begin annual random audits. The mandate remains funding-dependent and still contains no meaningful minimum audit universe or statistically defensible search-log sampling requirement.
Case numbers weakened to “if available”
The strong purpose field remains, but the complementary case or incident number becomes conditional. That creates an unnecessary escape valve from tying a historical-location query to an identifiable investigation.
Entity exemptions invite gamesmanship
Transportation agencies, public works departments, campus transportation functions, parking operations and other entities receive carveouts. Privacy obligations should follow the use of the data—not merely which department happens to own the contract.
CDTFA receives default access
The bill creates a special pathway granting the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration default access to locally collected ALPR scans for specified tax-enforcement purposes.
CDTFA is mission creep written into statute
“The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration shall be granted default access to any ALPR database for a public agency’s collected scans for [specified tax-administration and enforcement purposes].”
This should trouble anyone who has followed California’s own arguments against federal data repurposing.
California has challenged DOGE access to sensitive Treasury systems. It has challenged Medicaid information being transferred for immigration enforcement. It has opposed IRS taxpayer information being repurposed for immigration purposes.
The principle underlying those disputes is straightforward:
Yet SB 1013 moves toward exactly that result with ALPR data.
A city may tell residents that its cameras exist to recover stolen cars, locate missing people, or investigate serious crimes.
That does not mean residents agreed to construct a statewide historical location database for tax enforcement.
The issue is not whether CDTFA has legitimate enforcement responsibilities. It plainly does.
The issue is whether those responsibilities justify standing, default access to location information gathered by entirely different agencies for entirely different purposes.
How mission creep happens
Build surveillance infrastructure for stolen cars, missing persons and criminal investigations.
Other agencies discover that the location database would also be useful for their missions.
The debate shifts from whether the database should exist to which government agencies get access.
The exemptions create another route around accountability
SB 1013 increasingly relies on exemptions based on organizational identity rather than narrowly exempted activities.
That matters because government can move programs between departments.
Imagine a city places ALPR cameras and the vendor contract under its transportation or public works department, while police retain searchable access to the same location database.
Police access may trigger some obligations. But the upstream entity operating the infrastructure may argue that it falls within a categorical exemption.
That creates exactly the sort of organizational gamesmanship privacy law should prevent.
Exempt the activity, not the entity.
If ALPR is used solely for a tightly regulated parking or traffic-enforcement activity, that specific activity can receive a narrow exemption.
But once the same information or infrastructure becomes available for ordinary police investigation, intelligence gathering, or another nonexempt purpose, the exemption should end.
The bill offers Californians a strange bargain
SB 1013 now offers Californians better query documentation and somewhat tighter sharing controls in exchange for a much larger and potentially permanent government location repository, delayed state auditing, proliferating categorical exemptions, weakened case-number accountability, and a new statewide tax-enforcement access pathway.
We do not think that is a good trade.
The purpose requirement is strong.
The expanded contract protections are useful.
The restrictions on default national sharing are meaningful.
But procedural safeguards around a surveillance database do not answer the antecedent question of whether government should preserve the database in the first place.
California should not legislate a surveillance safe harbor
If SB 1013 passes in its current form, future agencies and government lawyers will inevitably argue that California considered ALPR retention in detail and deliberately selected this architecture.
They will say the Legislature knew ALPR recorded location information, knew innocent motorists were captured, understood the constitutional debate around digital location privacy, and nevertheless adopted a statutory regime that preserves qualifying information in an archive.
That argument would not automatically make the surveillance constitutional.
But privacy legislation should not create the appearance of legislative approval for mass location surveillance.
Californians have never affirmatively consented to government maintaining a searchable record of everywhere they drive simply because they use public roads.
Passing procedural rules around that surveillance should not substitute for that democratic question.
California can do better
Lawmakers should amend SB 1013 to:
- Restore mandatory deletion rather than mandatory archival.
- Preserve local authority to adopt much shorter retention periods.
- Begin meaningful DOJ oversight when the law takes effect, rather than waiting until late 2029.
- Remove CDTFA’s default access to locally collected ALPR databases.
- Replace entity-based exemptions with activity-based exemptions and an explicit mixed-use savings clause.
- Restore a strong case/incident-number requirement with only narrow, documented exceptions.
If those problems are not fixed, lawmakers should vote no on SB 1013.
Privacy rules should constrain surveillance. They should not create permanent surveillance infrastructure and then call the access controls privacy.
Read our SB 1013 Opposition letter here.