Quinnipiac assistant professor discusses retailers' use of license plate readers

Our Take

Credit to WFSB 3 for getting Quinnipiac's Kimberly Przeszlowski on camera to talk about something we don't cover enough here: retailers running their own license plate readers. Most of the conversation about ALPRs centers on police departments and Flock Safety's law-enforcement contracts, but plate-reading cameras are cheap enough now that private businesses can bolt them onto parking lots with zero public oversight, zero warrant requirement, and often zero disclosure to the shoppers driving in.

That's the real story buried in this segment. When a retailer logs your plate, that data doesn't necessarily stay with the retailer — it can be sold, shared with "loss prevention" networks, or handed to police who'd otherwise need a subpoena to get it. Commercial ALPR use is a backdoor into the same mass-surveillance grid we track on our camera map, just with even less transparency than the government version, since there's no public records request that forces a Target or a mall operator to show its hand.

Academic voices like Przeszlowski's are useful precisely because this corner of the surveillance economy gets so little scrutiny. If you're noticing new camera rigs in parking lots near you, document them and check our take-action page for how to push back — whether that's asking store management direct questions or pressing local lawmakers to close the private-sector loophole before it becomes as normalized as the police version already is.