Congress Introduces Two LPR Bills

Two bills introduced within days of each other would put new federal rules on ALPR systems. Neither is law.

The Ban Flock Act, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would take the much more restrictive approach. The bill would prohibit federal agencies from using ALPRs or accessing information collected by them. It would also prohibit certain federal grants from going to state and local governments that use ALPR systems or contract with ALPR companies. The legislation would also allow individuals to sue the federal government for violations. Despite its name, the bill’s actual language applies to ALPR technology generally, not just Flock.

The Stop Flock Abuse Act, introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley, takes a different approach. Rather than banning the technology, it would establish federal safeguards for its use. Among other things, the proposal would prohibit government agencies from selling or sharing vehicle-location data with nongovernmental parties, require written authorization and audit logs for searches, require regular review of those logs, require encryption and U.S.-based data storage, and generally require driver data to be deleted after 10 days, with exceptions for active criminal investigations. It would also prohibit facial recognition within ALPR networks and bar technology sourced from foreign adversaries.

So, in very simple terms:

Sanders/Merkley/Ocasio-Cortez: Don’t let the federal government use it, and use federal funding to discourage state and local governments from using it.

Hawley: Keep the technology, but put strict rules around how the government can collect, search, retain and share the information.

There’s one particularly interesting detail for the repossession industry. The Ban Flock Act specifically addresses government access to ALPR information collected by private companies. That makes the legislation relevant to the larger question we’ve been examining: what happens when the government doesn’t collect the information itself, but obtains access to a privately maintained database?

Neither bill has become law, and both face the normal legislative process before anything would change.

For now, we have a federal court questioning warrantless historical ALPR searches and two members of Congress proposing very different answers to the larger privacy question.

The technology isn’t going away.

The question is who gets to use the data—and under what rules.