South Carolina lacks laws to regulate license plate reader cameras, investigation finds

Our Take

Credit to Grace Runkel and the FOX Carolina team for digging into something a lot of local newsrooms skip over: the fact that South Carolina has no statewide law on the books governing license plate reader cameras. No rules on how long footage is kept, who can access it, what counts as a legitimate reason to search the data, or how agencies should be held accountable when something goes wrong. That's not an oversight — it's the default condition in most of the country, and it's exactly how this surveillance infrastructure keeps expanding without a real public debate.

When there's no law, there's no floor. Police departments and private vendors like Flock Safety get to write their own policies, which means the rules can change department to department, or get quietly rewritten with zero public input. South Carolina residents are having their daily movements logged by cameras they never voted for, under retention and sharing policies they can't see, enforced by nobody in particular. That's the pattern we track everywhere: the tech rolls out first, the guardrails get promised later, and later rarely comes.

If you're in South Carolina, or anywhere else, find out what's already watching your street on our camera map, and if you want to push back on unregulated ALPR deployment in your town, our take-action page has concrete steps to get started.