We Demand More Information on How Marin Cops Illegally Shared Flock ALPR Data

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office is the latest California law enforcement agency to get caught sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from their Flock Safety system with out-of-state and federal agencies. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are calling them out for this direct violation of California law, which has put every driver in the county at risk and is especially dangerous for immigrants, abortion seekers, and other targets of the federal government.

Today, we sent the Marin County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) a demand letter and request for records under the California Public Records Act following the Point Reyes Light’s recent report that MCSO provided non-California agencies access to its ALPR database. This directly violates California law and the terms of the 2022 Settlement Agreement in our case Lagleva v. Marin County Sheriff.

ALPRs are cameras that capture images of vehicles and upload their location to a searchable, shareable database. They are a mass surveillance technology that collects data indiscriminately on every vehicle on the road.

Sharing ALPR data with out-of-state or federal agencies—for any reason—violates California law (SB 34). If this data is shared for the purpose of assisting with immigration enforcement, agencies violate an additional California law (SB 54).  

But network audit logs obtained by Point Reyes Light show that during the final months of 2024, Marin County Sheriff’s Office shared ALPR data with multiple out-of-state and federal agencies, including 254,131 times in November 2024 alone. Many of these searches were conducted by law enforcement in states that impose severe restrictions on reproductive care and have a history of assisting ICE, including Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida, and Texas.

This sharing violated state law and “exposed sensitive driver location information to misuse by the federal government and by states that lack California’s robust privacy protections,” the letter explains.