Protecting Privacy. Preserving Choice.

Neither. Eyes Off Indiana is not anti-police, and we are not advocates for ALPR cameras either. Used well, these systems recover stolen cars, find missing people, and help catch fugitives. Knit into networks, they can also reconstruct an intimate portrait of any driver's life—where you work, where you worship, who you see and how often—which is why courts are actively weighing whether mass ALPR surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment. Our position is a floor, not a ceiling: the state should set minimum safeguards now—a 7-day retention limit, a ban on selling Hoosiers' data, and strict transparency and audit requirements—while every community retains the power to adopt stricter rules or reject the cameras entirely. Many of our supporters believe ALPRs should be banned outright. We share many of those concerns, and nothing in our proposal stands in the way of a community deciding it wants no cameras at all.

No—because the risks of keeping that data far outweigh the rare cases where it might help. ALPR data almost never solves cold cases. The overwhelming majority of scans have no connection to any crime, and data older than a few weeks is almost never useful. Meanwhile, long-term retention creates real dangers: misuse by officers, unauthorized sharing, data breaches, and the quiet expansion of mass surveillance. Police can still retain plate records tied to active investigations through a written request. But storing everyone’s movements “just in case” turns a public safety tool into a tracking system for millions of innocent people. Tracking every car with GPS would help solve crimes too, but we don’t allow that because it violates basic rights. This is no different.

Requiring a warrant controls who can look at stored data, but it does not prevent the government from stockpiling the movements of innocent drivers. Once the data exists, it can be leaked, misused, or quietly repurposed. Deleting scans that are not tied to an active case removes those risks while preserving the ability to retain relevant records when a legitimate investigation emerges.

“Nothing to hide” has never been the standard for constitutional rights. You protect your home, your phone, and your personal information not because you are hiding crimes, but because privacy is part of basic security. ALPR data is the same. Once long-term location records exist, they can be and already have been misused, including officers looking up an ex-partner’s movements, checking who visits certain clinics or churches, or monitoring political activity out of curiosity. These abuses happen precisely because the data is there. Protecting privacy is not about hiding something; it is about preventing powerful tools from being turned against innocent people.

A single image in public is not the issue. The problem is scale. Some cities have ALPRs at nearly every intersection, making it almost impossible to drive without being recorded. That creates a detailed, long-term map of a person’s movements, far beyond what anyone reasonably expects when they leave home. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that long-term location tracking is a search under the Fourth Amendment, even when each individual moment occurs in public. ALPR networks can replicate that same level of intrusive tracking if no limits are in place.

Your phone collects data because you choose to carry it and can control, limit, or turn off those services. ALPR tracking is different: it is done by the government, requires no consent, and cannot be opted out of. You can leave your phone at home; you cannot avoid driving past government-run cameras placed at every intersection. And unlike private phone data, ALPR records can be pooled, shared, or searched by agencies without you ever knowing. The issue is not the technology; it is involuntary, government-run location tracking with no clear limits.