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ORWELL INDEX

Who runs license plate readers in San Luis Obispo County?

On the map

0
Verified by us
141
Community-reported

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), including community reporting via the DeFlock project. Tiles by OpenFreeMap.

What we do not know

San Luis Obispo County Sheriff

  • What the office actually operates. Policy 466 describes vehicle-mounted readers; the Atlas records a different vendor; a campaign site counts a third kind of camera. These are not the same system.
  • Whether plate data collected here is held by a vendor, and under what retention.
  • Whether the office participates in any inter-agency or interstate search network. The policy contains no provision about one, in either printing.
  • Whether anyone has ever audited who searched this data. The policy requires no query audit.
  • When the Board of Supervisors approved plate readers, at what cost, and whether the public was ever heard.

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 Luis Obispo County.

Go to the San Luis Obispo 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 ↗