Who runs license plate readers in San Francisco County?
- Expanding License plate readers
- Agency
- San Francisco Police Department
- Vendor
- Flock Safety, Motorola/Vigilant, Thomson Reuters Clear
- Devices
- —
| System | Agency | Vendor | Status | Devices |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| License plate readers | San Francisco Police Department | Flock Safety, Motorola/Vigilant, Thomson Reuters Clear | Expanding | — |
On the map
- 0
- Verified by us
- 494
- Community-reported
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), including community reporting via the DeFlock project. Tiles by OpenFreeMap.
What we do not know
San Francisco Police
- How many cameras there are now. The 300 figure and the 400 target come from the October 2024 report. The 2025 report has not been read and the 2022 and 2023 reports are in our corpus unread, so we can make no year-over-year claim.
- What the roughly 230 receiving agencies did with the data. The list tells us the shape of the network from one end. It says nothing about what any recipient searched for, and nothing on this page should be read as suggesting otherwise.
- Whether internal audits have been conducted since the 2024 reporting year. The department answered no for that year and we have not read a later report.
- What the department's public notice actually contains. The policy carries a checklist of notice elements, and checkbox marks do not survive text extraction reliably enough to report. This needs the pages read as images.
- What Proposition E, passed in March 2024, changed about the department's obligations under Chapter 19B. The code is published on a host that refused our requests, so we have not read it and make no claim about it.
What license plate readers are
An automated license plate reader photographs every passing vehicle and records the plate, the time and the place. It does not watch suspects. It logs everyone, and the record is usually kept on a vendor’s servers.
How they work, why agencies buy them, and every county we have documented →
What you can do
Civic action
Show up
This technology is bought and renewed by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have not yet confirmed where each of them meets in San Francisco County.
Go to the San Francisco County hub →Personal protection
Protect yourself
Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.
Surveillance Self-Defense ↗