The Fourth Amendment
Courts are now deciding whether a searchable log of everywhere your car has been is a search that needs a warrant. Here is where the law stands.
A federal court calls it a search
On October 1, 2026, in United States v. Kyle, U.S. District Judge Sara Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma ruled that a Tulsa County deputy violated the Fourth Amendment when he searched Flock's database, without a warrant, for a driver's travel history. He ran the out-of-state plate before he had seen any traffic violation, and the search returned more than 50 sightings of the car over about a month. The judge suppressed the evidence, calling the lookup indiscriminate mass surveillance.
It is reported to be the first time a federal court has held that police use of an ALPR system violated the Fourth Amendment. It binds only that one district, which does not include Texas, and Flock has said it expects an appeal.
Sources: Gizmodo · Law Commentary · Cato Institute
The other side, and Norfolk
Police agencies and Flock argue that a license plate in public view carries no reasonable expectation of privacy, and that the cameras take isolated still photos at fixed locations rather than tracking anyone continuously. Many courts have accepted that argument.
The biggest challenge so far, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, went the city's way. Two residents showed that Norfolk's Flock cameras had photographed their cars 475 and 325 times in four months. In January 2026, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the evidence didn't show the system could rebuild the whole of a driver's movements, so it was not a search. The residents, represented by the Institute for Justice, said they would appeal.
Sources: WAVY · Institute for Justice (2025 ruling letting the case proceed)
Why Carpenter matters
In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that police need a warrant to get historical cell phone location records, because a long record of where someone has been reveals far more than any single sighting.
Civil liberties advocates argue the same logic applies to ALPR networks. Each photo may be taken in public, but a growing network of cameras, all feeding one searchable database, adds up to a detailed log of a person's travel. They say building and searching that log should require probable cause and a judge's sign-off.