Police use drones, body cameras, and license plate readers as part of their daily work. Supporters say these tools make communities safer. Critics see something different, a system that collects too much data and opens the door to abuse. When surveillance expands without public oversight, civil liberties start to slip away, especially for people who already face bias and discrimination.
Who controls the data collected by police?
We need to ask how the police handle collected data, what security measures they use, and who has access to our personal information. Judging by the cases that occasionally reach the public, there is plenty of reason for concern.
An investigation found that automated license plate reader systems used by police departments were leaking live video and vehicle data to the internet. Poor network settings left some cameras open to anyone, with no passwords or safeguards. In one case, a single police camera recorded nearly a thousand vehicles in twenty minutes.
In a similar case, officials in Illinois opened an investigation after finding that local police had shared license plate data with a Texas sheriff’s office. The information was later used in immigration and abortion-related inquiries, revealing how a system built for tracking vehicles can expand into broader surveillance.
Data protection itself is under question. In the United Kingdom alone, more than 13,000 data breach incidents have been recorded in the past few years. Most of them involved misdirected emails, documents sent to the wrong address, lost or stolen devices such as laptops and USB drives, or accidental publication of data. Internal mishandling by police officers has also been a frequent cause.
Facial recognition in law enforcement
Police forces are expanding facial-recognition programs. AI suggests possible matches from databases, but a human officer makes the final call.
In London, the Metropolitan Police plans to increase live facial-recognition deployments from a few times a week to as many as ten. The United Kingdom has no specific law governing how police use facial recognition in public, leaving decisions to internal policies and local discretion.
In the United States, Customs and Border Protection has launched a mobile app called Mobile Identify. It allows local officers to scan faces and match them against federal databases. Privacy experts might note the absence of public documentation on data collection and storage, which leaves questions about how the information is used or shared.
New Orleans officials are considering legal changes that would permit police to use facial-recognition tools for tracking suspects and missing people. Civil-rights group argues that this would open the door to constant monitoring of public spaces and could lead to misidentifications, especially for people of color, women and older people.
Similar debates are emerging elsewhere as law enforcement agencies adopt facial recognition faster than governments establish rules for its use.
Lack of oversight in police use of spyware
Police agencies in several countries have increased their use of commercial spyware and data-extraction tools with little transparency.
According to Amnesty International, police in Serbia used Cellebrite systems and Android spyware to monitor journalists and activists. In Ontario, provincial police were tied to Israeli spyware tools under weak supervision, and in Georgia, authorities approved new contracts for data-extraction technology during protests.
The same technologies have become part of a broader legal and ethical debate. Court cases against firms such as NSO Group, the maker of Pegasus spyware, have forced partial disclosure of how the tools operate and who used them.
Germany’s highest court ruled that police surveillance through spyware represents a serious intrusion on privacy and may only be used in investigations of serious offenses.
Chat Control divides Europe over privacy and security
In recent months, the EU has seen growing debate over a proposal known as Chat Control, which would give agencies access to private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos. While the measure is meant to target the trafficking of child sexual abuse material, many believe it is only an excuse for expanding surveillance over the public.
“If governments mandate scanning, they must also assume liability for the predictable harms it causes. False positives are not going to be anomalies; they are statistically inevitable,” said Benjamin Schilz, CEO of Wire. “Expert bodies within the EU and the German Bundestag have already warned that detection systems for new material and grooming are deeply inaccurate and would overwhelm law enforcement with false reports.”
How societies balance public safety and personal privacy will shape both the work of police and the lives of citizens under technology’s watch.