Goodyear, Arizona | Records Requests Policy for ALPR Data
The short version: Jen's Two Cents documents how Goodyear, AZ quietly reworked its public records process for ALPR data after she requested — and received — a detailed file of her own movements.
Our Take
Credit to Jen's Two Cents (Jen & Friends Podcast) for digging into a Goodyear, Arizona city council worksession that most residents will never hear about. Her own public records request turned up exactly what we've been warning about for years: a dated, timestamped log of her car's movements, backed by hundreds of license plate photos, sitting in a government database. That's not an abstract privacy concern — that's a stranger's ability to reconstruct where you go, when, and how often, just by pulling a file.
What's just as telling is the second half of the story: now that this kind of request has drawn public attention and state legislators are circling the issue, the city is rewriting how it handles these requests. That's the pattern we see again and again — agencies deploy ALPR networks with little public debate, and only tighten up transparency and process once someone forces the issue by actually asking for their own data. Pending state legislation may settle some of this, but it shouldn't take a resident's FOIA fight to find out how much tracking data a city is sitting on.
If you want to see whether Flock or other ALPR cameras are logging your plate near home, work, or anywhere else, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on how your city handles this data, our take-action resources can help you get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Jen's Two Cents. | Jen & Friends Podcast, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.