In quick succession, two courts weighed in on the license plate reader problem – in very different ways.
In Schmidt v Norfolk, the one you’ve probably heard of, a federal court declined to reconsider the “no right to privacy in a public place” axiom in the wake of Carpenter, Beautiful Struggle and other cases starting to look at it in a different way. The judge however did leave the door open to a different conclusion in the future.
In Bartholomew v Parking Concepts, the case you haven’t heard of, the CA Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling to determine that an ALPR operator not having the written privacy policy that is required by SB 34 (2015) is all by itself a privacy harm for which an injured plaintiff can sue. The unanimous decision by a 3 judge panel concluded that if a plaintiff cannot access the information about what is being collected, how it is being stored and who has access to it that they are entitled to by law, then they have been sufficiently harmed to file a lawsuit. This ruling makes SB 34 immediately a more enforceable and more useful regulatory tool.
You can read both court decisions below.
Bartholomew v Parking Concepts
Schmidt v Norfolk