Utah governor says he’s ‘deeply troubled’ by Flock cameras, calls for review to protect privacy

The top agency responsible for the largest chunk of those searches was Houston Police Department in Texas, with more than 423,000 searches or more than 26%.

Most of this Utah county’s license plate camera data is searched by out-of-state law enforcement  

Cox said he was “deeply troubled” by the issues raised by the Utah Civic Compact investigation, which has called on lawmakers to address the issue of out-of-state agencies making a large amount of requests to Utah-based Flock cameras with no systems in place to verify whether those searchers follow Utah’s existing laws that regulate how automatic license plate reader data can be used. 

Automatic license plate reader cameras, including those in the Flock Safety network, have been used by law enforcement agencies all across the country for years to help investigate crime. But concerns over privacy and misuse have surfaced in recent months, with reports from agencies across the U.S. where some law enforcement officials have accessed the cameras’ data for personal reasons.

“I think Americans should be deeply concerned about that,” Cox said.

He said Utah has been on “the forefront of really trying to put guardrails around the use of those types of technologies to protect citizens’ privacy, that it can only be used in the most extreme circumstances to protect life and safety.”

But the governor added, “I don’t think we should say, ‘hey, just trust us.” 

So he said he’s asked the Utah Privacy Governing Board and the Utah Privacy Commission to “do a review of all of our rules and regulations around these cameras, especially how they’re being used with local agencies to make sure that they are not being abused, to make sure that the public understands how and when they can be used, and if there are abuses taking place, people are held accountable.”

Cox noted Utah already has laws regulating Flock cameras, but “the question is, is the legislation being followed?”

So that’s why he said he’s asked the Utah Privacy Commission to look into whether lawmakers can do anything more to ensure Flock cameras can’t be misused. 

“If there are some gaps, then yes, I would absolutely support legislation,” he said, “but I think the legislation we have in place should allow us to protect people’s privacy.”

After the governor’s comments on Thursday, Clark Dice, communications director of the Utah Civic Compact, applauded Cox for saying Flock cameras are an issue Americans should be concerned with, and he praised the governor for asking state privacy officials to see if there are any gaps in enforcement of existing laws. 

“What we want to emphasize is to make sure that the governor understands that we have found documented cases of where the enforcement of Utah privacy laws are getting muddled with respect to how outside agencies access our data,” Dice said, pointing to the more than 5 million searches in Weber County alone, mostly from out of state. Dice said, “we can’t say” that anytime an outside agency requests to view that data “those were 5 million instances of malfeasance, but from what we can tell, there is very little data on whether or not these outside agencies had to adhere to Utah privacy laws before they accessed the data.”

In other words, there’s no way to tell if they’re following Utah law. 

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“There’s no system for it,” Connor Radcliffe, president of the Utah Civic Compact, told Utah News Dispatch. 

Of the thousands of law enforcement agencies in the U.S. that use the cameras, he said “I’m willing to bet a significant amount of them have actual procedures in place (but) as we’ve seen in different parts of the country, protocols and such seem to be insufficient to stop abuse of a personal nature from police officers.”

“So we have no way of knowing if we’re being exposed to some cop searching his ex-girlfriend across state lines, for example,” Radcliffe said. “We can’t tell if that’s not happening because we can’t audit them, obviously.” 

As backlash against the cameras has grown, the company Flock Safety earlier this month announced changes to its platform to address privacy concerns and “documented abuses of its system by some members of law enforcement.”

Radcliffe said he’s hopeful, “based on the governor’s reaction,” that Utah’s Republican-controlled Legislature “will kind of rally around this and decide that it’s something we need to get a handle on.”

“This technology is going to get more pervasive, and it’s going to get more intrusive and more advanced,” he said, “and it’s really important that we get ahead of this.”

Utah’s existing laws on Flock cameras

Utah already has laws regulating automatic license plate readers, with a default ban on them unless they’re used by a law enforcement agency to access captured license plate data in four instances: as part of an active criminal investigation, to apprehend someone with an outstanding warrant, to locate a missing or endangered person, or to locate a stolen vehicle. 

The data, Utah law says, can’t be used or shared for any other reason, and misuse is a crime punishable with a class B misdemeanor. 

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However, there’s no way for Utah law enforcement to verify whether other agencies — including out-of-state agencies — are adhering to Utah’s license plate reader law, the Utah Civic Compact pointed out on its website showing the results of its investigation. 

“The statute sets a requirement that no administrative apparatus was ever built to carry out,” the nonprofit’s website says. “Utah requires each search to be logged with a crime type and incident number, and requires those logs to be kept for five years, but no office collects them, no format is specified, and no agency reports them to anyone. Whether the requirement is being met is left to each agency to determine for itself, and whatever it determines stays with that agency.”

The Utah Civic Compact warned that county and city police budgets are already tight, and they don’t have the manpower or structure to audit their records. That’s not a “failure” of the agencies, the nonprofit said, but a “predictable structural outcome.”

“That infrastructure does not exist inside Utah, for Utah’s own agencies,” the Utah Civic Compact said. “It certainly does not exist for the 3,343 agencies across 45 states that have searched this network. Meaningful accountability would mean auditing every one of them, and no authority in Utah has the power or the tools to do that.”

While raising these concerns, the Utah Civic Compact has called for a legislative audit of Flock cameras in Utah, and a mechanism that would allow a law enforcement agency sharing residents’ location data to determine whether the recipients of the records are following Utah law. Today, there’s no way to do so. 

The nonprofit has also called on every Utah agency operating automatic license plate readers to publish its network sharing configuration. 

And the Utah Civic Compact wants to see lawmakers pass tighter restrictions around Flock cameras, noting that three bills focused on reforming automatic license plate reader laws have failed since 2025. 

That included HB468, which passed the House but died in the Senate. That bill would have added reporting requirements and created standards for the data obtained from the cameras, among other measures. 

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