“If you want to get in your car and you want to go down to Buc-ee’s in St. Augustine, it’s really none of the government’s damn business if you’re doing that, right?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday at a news conference. He announced that Florida will revoke all law enforcement license-plate-recognition camera permits on state highways, with all such cameras to be removed by the end of September.
“What we don’t want in the state of Florida is to have a digital AI surveillance state where everything we’re doing is being tracked at all times,” DeSantis added, referring to the recent expansion of ALPRs—automated license plate reader cameras—across the country. The cameras are supposed to catch people committing crimes, and sometimes they do. But they’re also ripe for abuse. Each camera forms part of a nationwide network, and by sharing vehicle information between and within police departments, ALPRs can enable officers to track what are called “patterns of life”: where a person is likely to be, who they spend time with, and what they’re doing in a given moment.
Police officers nationwide are taking advantage of that surveillance ability. In dozens of cases, officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for doing things like searching an ex-girlfriend’s license plate information 2,000 times, searching an estranged wife’s license plates 700 times, or tracking an abortion-seeker across state lines.
Florida is not alone in cancelling Flock contracts. Texas, last week, ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras. The Oakland-based advocacy group Secure Justice, which tracks automated license plate reader use on the municipal level, says that in the month of August more towns and cities cancelled their Flock contracts than ever before: of the 214 cities that have dropped Flock since 2021, 90 did so in August 2026. (At least three towns have reported that Flock reinstalled or reactivated their cameras after local officials ended their contracts.)