Is your privacy on the road a thing of the past? Watch this before you drive.

Our Take

Credit to Legitimate Cybersecurity for digging into something most of us scrolled past: a Washington state law that reportedly carves automated license plate reader data out of public records disclosure. That matters a lot more than it sounds. Public records requests are one of the only tools reporters, defense attorneys, and ordinary residents have to find out how these cameras are actually being used, who's pulling the data, and whether it's being shared with ICE, bounty hunters, or out-of-state agencies. Seal that off and you've effectively told the public to trust the system on faith.

We've seen this pattern before — a vendor like Flock Safety builds a nationwide network of plate-reading cameras, local police departments sign up without much public debate, and then the legal infrastructure gets adjusted after the fact to make oversight harder rather than easier. Once data access is exempted from public records law, audits become a courtesy from the agency rather than a right for the public. That's a dangerous direction for a surveillance system that already tracks millions of law-abiding drivers' daily movements.

If you want to see how dense this camera network already is in your area, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on secrecy laws like this one, our take-action page has steps for contacting local officials before these exemptions become the national norm.