Class Action Lawsuit Alleges Home Depot Parking Lot Cameras Secretly Transmit Driver Data to Law Enforcement

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A proposed class action lawsuit claims that Home Depot runs a “covert surveillance operation” in the parking lots of its California stores by using automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras to capture vehicle data and feed it to a database accessible to law enforcement nationwide.

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The 57-page complaint contends that Home Depot has violated California law by deploying large-scale camera systems that capture the license plate, make, model, color and “distinguishing features” of every vehicle that enters or exits its parking lots. Per the case, this identifying data is logged with precise timestamps and location information and funneled into a “centralized, searchable database” accessible to nationwide law enforcement agencies.

According to the lawsuit, Home Depot has failed to comply with several requirements of California’s Automated License Plate Recognition Privacy Act, including by failing to identify the title of the official custodian responsible for the ALPR system, failing to set a defined retention period for the captured data, and allowing for “open-ended” law enforcement sharing with no meaningful restrictions on federal and/or out-of-state agencies or immigration enforcement.

Per the suit, the retailer has also failed to identify training requirements for any employees and contractors that use the system, describe how the system will be monitored and identify the measures that will be taken to ensure the system’s accuracy and correct errors.

“Every day, the vehicles, and the movements, habits, and lives of California residents shopping at Home Depot are being covertly captured and funneled into a national surveillance network, with or without notice sufficient to satisfy California law,” the class action lawsuit summarizes.

The filing also notes that ALPR data can have significant economic value as it may be aggregated by data brokers for targeted advertising and consumer profiling.

The complaint argues that Home Depot’s noncompliance with the California ALPR Act is particularly concerning given the size of the company and prior reports concerning Flock Safety, Home Depot’s ALPR vendor. According to the suit, Flock secretly re-enabled “nationwide” data-sharing settings for ALPR cameras deployed by state law enforcement agencies in Mountain View and Ventura Counties without authorization, exposing vehicle data to agencies not approved by either department.

“The Mountain View and Ventura County incidents establish a documented pattern: Flock routinely configures or re-enables ‘nationwide’ or ‘statewide’ access settings on California customer systems without authorization, resulting in the exposure of California ALPR data to federal agencies,” the suit alleges.

The lawsuit claims that the Flock ALPR systems have also contributed to wrongful law enforcement encounters, including at least 12 misread incidents in which innocent people were stopped at gunpoint, arrested or attacked by police dogs after being misidentified.

Despite scrutiny surrounding Flock’s practices, Home Depot has not announced that it will stop using the company’s surveillance systems or make any modifications to its data-sharing procedures, the case says.

The Home Depot license plate reader class action lawsuit looks to represent all individuals whose vehicles were captured by automated license plate reader systems operated by Home Depot or its vendors at any California retail location from the date Flock cameras were first installed through the present.

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