Just raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the PD keeps on hand from Flock searches.

There is an interesting thing happening in FOIA law here in WA (you'd never notice it from this spammy article, though). A pretty common FOIA exemption is for data not managed by a public body, but via some commercial vendor. FOIA generally only allows you to demand production of (1) actual documents that (2) the public body has (3) on hand (or are generally deemed to have on hand, such as email records).

So it's pretty legally dubious that you can use FOIA to compel production from Flock (you can probably compel, from the public body, any number of reports Flock can generate --- we've done that here for our Flock network and sharing configurations, for instance).

Here it sounds like a WA judge might be saying that some corpus of data Flock maintains is effectively public data. If that's the case, that's a novel interpretation.

> ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)

Not potential problems, actual existing problems: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...

> ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.)

the stalker is gonna be a cop with full access to that data though. if its good enough to be in cops hands, who are utterly unaccountable to anyone, its safe enough to be in the general public's too.