There is no reasonable expectation of privacy against ALPR tracking of a car. It’s not at all like Carpenter’s CSLI. United States v. Floyd, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 229044 (M.D. Fla. Nov. 21, 2025):
Defendant has not identified any other criminal case that has held a law enforcement officer must obtain a search warrant to either use an ALPR database or query an ALPR database, and the Court’s own research has not yielded any such case. Instead, Defendant relies heavily on United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), and Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), to argue that the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that modern surveillance that allows police to observe the whole of a person’s physical movements may constitute a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. But Jones was a case about the physical attachment of a GPS tracking device to a vehicle, and Carpenter was a case about historical location information compiled by the defendant’s cellular phone provider — neither are perfect analogues for the present situation.
Neither the United States Supreme Court nor the Eleventh Circuit have taken up this precise question in a published opinion. But the Supreme Court has considered the constitutionality of an alleged search related to a vehicle identification number, which is reasonably similar to a license plate in important ways. In New York v. Class, the Supreme Court explained a variety of “factors that generally diminish the reasonable expectation of privacy in automobiles,” including their function as modes of transportation rather than residences, and the fact that they are “justifiably the subject of pervasive regulation” by the government. 475 U.S. 106, 112-13 (1986). The Court ultimately concluded, as it pertained to a VIN number, that it was “unreasonable to have an expectation of privacy in an object required by law to be located in a place ordinarily in plain view from the exterior of an automobile.” Id. at 114. Consequently, the Supreme Court held that “there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in the VIN.” Id.
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Other courts have considered this issue, and of the cases examining this license plate reader issue that the Court has located and reviewed, all have declined to extend Carpenter to license plates. See United States v. Yang, 958 F.3d 851, 859 (9th Cir. 2020) (defendant lacked standing and had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the historical license plate information captured by readers); United States v. Toombs, 671 F. Supp. 3d 1329, 1333-34 (N.D. Ala. 2023); United States v. Brown, No. 19 CR 949, 2021 WL 4963602, at *4 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 26, 2021) (finding that officers did not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they queried the automatic license plate reader databases); United States v. Bowers, No. 2:18-CR-00292-DWA, 2021 WL 4775977, at *3 (W.D. Pa. Oct. 11, 2021) (defendant did not have reasonable expectation of privacy in his license plate); United States v. Rubin, 556 F. Supp. 3d 1123, 1129 (N.D. Cal 2021) (declining to extend Carpenter to license plate reader technology).
In light of these decisions, and considering the particular circumstances of this case, there does not appear to be any legitimate basis upon which to conclude that Defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy as it relates to his license plate, automatic license plate readers, or in law enforcement’s queries of those license plate databases and systems.
