Drive through a Minnesota city and there’s a decent chance a camera reads your plate, stamps it with a time and a place, and checks it against a police database before you’ve reached the next light. No warrant. No suspicion. Nobody has to want you for anything.
That’s legal. And the Constitution has very little to say about it.
What protects you is a data statute: Minn. Stat. § 13.824. It doesn’t stop the camera. It decides what the camera may keep, who gets to look, how long the picture lives, and who has to prove the rules were followed. On paper it’s a tight statute. The gap is in who’s holding the data.
Is my license plate private under the Fourth Amendment?
No. The Minnesota Court of Appeals answered that in October 2012, on a trooper who ran a plate on his squad computer on Highway 2 and got a warrant hit on the owner:
A driver does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a license plate number which is required to be openly displayed.
State v. Setinich, 822 N.W.2d 9, 12 (Minn. Ct. App. 2012). The court held the computerized check wasn’t a search under either the Minnesota or the United States Constitution. That was one trooper and one plate. A network of cameras logging thousands of plates a day is a bigger animal, but it starts from the same place: the plate is out there for anyone to read, because the law makes you display it.
How Minnesota treats the location data your phone gives off is a different statute and a different story, which I covered at /news/chatrie-geofence-warrants-minnesota-got-there-first/. Your plate gets no warrant rule. It gets a retention rule.
What can the camera keep, and for how long?
The Legislature passed § 13.824 in 2015, effective August 1 of that year. 2015 Minn. Laws ch. 67, § 3. It starts by limiting what gets collected. Subdivision 2(a) allows three things: plate numbers; date, time, and location data on vehicles; and “pictures of license plates, vehicles, and areas surrounding the vehicles.” Then: “Collection of any data not authorized by this paragraph is prohibited.”
The data are “private data on individuals or nonpublic data” unless they fit one of the public categories in § 13.82 or are active criminal investigative data. § 13.824, subd. 2(b). The data may be matched against the Minnesota license plate data file, and against other sources only if they “relate to an active criminal investigation.” Subd. 2(c). And the same paragraph says, flatly, “A central state repository of automated license plate reader data is prohibited unless explicitly authorized by law.”
Then the clock. Subdivision 3(a):
Notwithstanding section 138.17, and except as otherwise provided in this subdivision, data collected by an automated license plate reader that are not related to an active criminal investigation must be destroyed no later than 60 days from the date of collection.
Section 138.17 is the general government-records law, so the Legislature pulled plate-reader data out of the ordinary retention schedules and set its own ceiling. “[N]o later than” makes 60 days the outer limit, not the target; an agency can purge sooner. And the clock runs only on data “not related to an active criminal investigation”. If your plate turns up in a case file, the 60-day rule doesn’t govern it, and once the investigation goes inactive the data follow the ordinary § 138.17 schedule instead. Subd. 3(d).
There are two ways to change the clock on purpose.
If you’re the subject of a pending criminal charge or complaint, you can make a written request, with the case or complaint number and a statement that the data “may be used as exculpatory evidence,” and the agency must preserve data that would otherwise be destroyed until the charge or complaint is resolved or dismissed. Subd. 3(b). That’s a defense tool, and it’s written into the statute. On a 60-day clock, it has to go out fast.
And if you’re a participant in the Secretary of State’s address-confidentiality program under chapter 5B, the program for people escaping domestic violence, sexual assault, harassment, or stalking, you can make a written request and the agency must destroy reader data related to you at the time of collection or on receipt of the request, whichever is later, unless the data are active criminal investigative data. The existence of that request is itself private. Subd. 3(c).
Who’s allowed to look at it?
Not just any cop with a login. This is the part of the statute I like best.
Under subdivision 7(b), an officer gets access only if authorized in writing by the chief, sheriff, or agency head (or a designee) for a “legitimate, specified, and documented law enforcement purpose.” And each access “must be based on a reasonable suspicion that the data are pertinent to an active criminal investigation”, with a record of the factual basis and the case number, complaint, or incident behind it. Looking up an ex’s plate doesn’t qualify. Under § 13.09, willfully violating chapter 13 is a misdemeanor, and for a public employee it’s “just cause” for suspension without pay or dismissal.
Then subdivision 7(c) requires role-based access and a data audit trail of “[a]ll queries and responses,” and says: “Data contained in the audit trail are public, to the extent that the data are not otherwise classified by law.” Read that again. The record of who searched is public data. Most people don’t know they can ask for it.
Sharing is fenced in too. Non-investigation data can go to another law enforcement agency only if that agency meets the subdivision 7 standard, and the receiving agency inherits every classification, destruction, and security rule. Subd. 4(a)–(b). To anyone else, the data “may not be shared with, disseminated to, sold to, or traded with any other individual or entity” unless a law explicitly allows it. Subd. 4(c).
One more rule, and it’s narrower than it sounds. Plate readers “must not be used to monitor or track an individual who is the subject of an active criminal investigation unless authorized by a warrant, issued upon probable cause, or exigent circumstances justify the use without obtaining a warrant.” Subd. 2(d). So the warrant rule protects the suspect. Everybody else just gets logged, held up to 60 days, and fenced off behind the access rules. That’s the deal the statute makes.
That rule has been enforced at least once. In July 2020 a Prior Lake officer looking into a report of a possible drunk driver couldn’t find the car at its owner’s home, so she asked Mystic Lake Casino’s surveillance office whether the casino’s plate reader had seen it. It had, and the casino called back with the car’s location and direction of travel. The officer found the car and arrested the driver. She never got a warrant. The district court suppressed the evidence under subdivision 2(d), and the Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed. It gave “warrant, issued upon probable cause” and “exigent circumstances” their constitutional meanings and held the State hadn’t proved an exigency, because the officer “acted on nothing more than a suspicion.” State v. Lelyukh, No. A21-0699, slip op. at 2, 6, 12–13 (Minn. Ct. App. Dec. 13, 2021) (nonprecedential). Three limits. The court didn’t decide whether suppression is even the right remedy for breaking this statute; the State raised that for the first time on appeal, and the court held it forfeited. Id. at 13–14. One judge dissented and would have found an exigency in a report of a drunk, speeding driver. Id. at D-1 (Ross, J., dissenting). And the opinion is nonprecedential, so under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c), it isn’t binding authority, though it “may be cited as persuasive authority.”
Can I see what they have on my car?
Generally, yes, and the request costs nothing to look.
Section 13.824 doesn’t have its own access subdivision. It doesn’t need one. Because plate-reader data are classified as private or nonpublic, the data-subject rights in § 13.04, subd. 3 come with them: you can ask whether you’re the subject of stored data and how it’s classified, you can be shown private or public data about you “without any charge”, and you can get copies at actual cost. The agency has to comply immediately if possible, or within ten days excluding weekends and legal holidays. I walked through how that request works, and where it hits a wall, at /news/minnesota-data-practices-request-13-04/.
Two catches. One is the clock. Data that aren’t tied to an active criminal investigation have to be gone within 60 days, so a request in month three may come back empty, and that may be the statute working exactly as written. The other is the wall. Active criminal investigative data are “confidential or protected nonpublic while the investigation is active.” § 13.82, subd. 7. If your plate is part of an open case, the subject-access route generally won’t reach it until the case goes inactive.
You don’t have to be the subject to get the public pieces. Subdivision 5 requires every agency using a reader to keep a public log: the times it actively collected, the aggregate number of plates read, the databases they were compared against, the number of hits by category, and the location of any fixed reader. The agency also has to keep a public list of current and past fixed locations unless it decides the locations are security information, and that call is subject to in-camera review by a judge. Subd. 5(b). Separately, the existence of an agency’s surveillance technology is public. § 13.82, subd. 31. And no agency may run a reader at all without a written policy that incorporates § 13.824. § 626.8472 says it plainly: “Use of an automated license plate reader without adoption of a written policy under this section is prohibited.”
The vendor problem
Here’s where the tight statute gets loose.
The 2015 law saw private cameras coming. Its very first definition says an automated license plate reader “includes a device that is owned or operated by a person who is not a government entity to the extent that data collected by the reader are shared with a law enforcement agency.” § 13.824, subd. 1(b). That sentence was in the original act; it isn’t a recent patch. (The one change in 2024 was to carve out red-light and speed cameras, which get their own rules. 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 127, art. 3, §§ 2–3.) Lelyukh is that situation: the reader was operated by a casino, and its data went to the police on request. Lelyukh, slip op. at 6 n.1. The court described § 13.824 as providing “comprehensive instructions to government entities—and non-government actors who share information with law enforcement agencies—for collecting, logging, storing, sharing, auditing, and destroying data collected by ALPRs.” Id. at 5–6. But both sides had assumed the statute applied, and the court said “we assume without deciding that the statute applies here.” Id. at 5. So whether a private camera is covered is still my reading, not a holding. My reading is that the sentence pulls a business’s or a neighborhood’s camera into § 13.824 once its data reach the police. How much of the statute then lands on the camera’s owner, as opposed to the agency, is less clear: most of its duties are written for “a law enforcement agency”. The court’s description points toward covering the owner too. It didn’t decide that, and it doesn’t turn the homeowners’ association into a government agency.
The harder question is the company that runs the network for the police. Plate data don’t always sit on a server in the police basement. When Minneapolis’s city auditor reviewed the department’s program, its first recommendation was about the “third-party service provider” behind the system. Then there’s Flock Safety, which the ACLU of Minnesota calls “the largest company in the ALPR space.” In written testimony to the Legislative Commission on Data Practices for its December 11, 2025 hearing, the ACLU told legislators that data on Flock’s servers is now “frequently, by default, shared with law enforcement and other Flock customers nationwide”, that one Minnesota department with ten cameras received over 11,300 searches from departments around the country in a 30-day period, and that this amounts to a private central repository that gets around the statute’s ban on a “central state repository”. Those are the ACLU’s claims, not mine. But the statutory question they raise is real.
Compare the body-camera statute, which deals with vendors head-on. Under § 13.825, subd. 11(a), a body-camera vendor “is subject to all of the requirements of this chapter as if it were a government entity”, and under paragraphs (c) and (d) it carries presumed damages on top. I covered that statute at /news/minnesota-police-body-camera-data-13825/. Section 13.824 has nothing like it. Not a word about vendors.
So a plate-reader vendor falls back on the general privatization rule, § 13.05, subd. 11(a): when a government entity contracts with a private person “to perform any of its functions,” the data that person handles in performing them are subject to chapter 13, and the private person must comply “as if it were a government entity”, with the § 13.08 remedies applying to it. I wrote about how that subdivision drags private contractors into the Data Practices Act at /news/minnesota-three-privacy-regimes/.
That subdivision has a history worth knowing. In November 2013 the Minnesota Supreme Court read the older version as a notice rule aimed at the government, and said: “There is no language in Minn.Stat. § 13.05, subd. 11(a), or any other provision of the Data Practices Act, that imposes any direct, affirmative obligations on private businesses that enter into contracts with the government.” Helmberger v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 839 N.W.2d 527, 531 (Minn. 2013). Six months later the Legislature rewrote the sentence in a bill whose title says it was “clarifying application of government data practices act to parties contracting with a government entity”, and added that leaving the notice out of a contract “does not invalidate the application of this subdivision.” 2014 Minn. Laws ch. 293, § 2. The governor signed it May 28, 2014, and that section took effect the next day.
What Helmberger didn’t decide is what counts as performing a government “function”. The court expressly didn’t reach that question. My reading is that running a police department’s plate-reader network, storing its data, and answering its queries is performing a police function, so the vendor is bound like the agency. I couldn’t find a Minnesota appellate court that has said so, one way or the other.
And whatever the vendor’s status, the duties in § 13.824 sit squarely on the agency. Non-investigation data may go to another law enforcement agency only on the subdivision 7 showing, and to no one else without explicit authority. If an agency’s settings let departments in other states search its Minnesota data without a documented purpose and a case number, the vendor’s contract doesn’t change the agency’s obligations. The agency owns that problem.
Who checks?
The agency does, by hiring someone who isn’t the agency.
Subdivision 6(a) requires each agency to keep records of when data were collected and how they’re classified, and to “arrange for an independent, biennial audit” of whether data are classified, how they’re used, whether they’re destroyed on time, and whether the subdivision 7 access rules are followed. The results are public. The Commissioner of Administration reviews them, may order more audits of an agency it believes isn’t complying, and holds the big stick: if the commissioner finds a “pattern of substantial noncompliance”, the agency “must immediately suspend operation of all automated license plate reader devices” until the commissioner lets it start again. The agency gets a reasonable chance to respond to the audit’s findings first. Subd. 6(a)–(b). A summary goes to the commissioner, the chairs and ranking minority members of the legislative committees that handle data practices and public safety, and the Legislative Commission on Data Practices and Personal Data Privacy within 30 days. Subd. 6(c). Agencies also have to tell the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension within ten days of putting a reader into use, and the BCA keeps a public list on its website. Subd. 8. When I read that list on October 19, 2026, it named 117 agencies.
What does one of these audits look like? Minneapolis’s most recent one, covering January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2024, was done by the city’s own Office of City Auditor and presented to the city’s audit committee on February 23, 2026. The bottom line: “We found MPD complies with all requirements in state statute governing ALPR use.” Then two recommendations. The first found that the department had no documented process for evaluating its vendor, so “assessment reports have not been requested or reviewed as a part of ongoing vendor oversight.” The second asked the department to finish and formally approve written procedures in three areas, one of which was “The process of checking and documenting data retention and deletion.”
So the department passed, and it hadn’t been asking the vendor for its own assessment reports. And the city’s cover certificate sending the audit to the Legislature says it’s filed “(Pursuant to Minnesota Statute 13.825 subd. 9)”, which is the body-camera statute. The audit inside cites the right one. Paperwork’s hard.
Apart from Lelyukh, I couldn’t find a Minnesota appellate decision applying § 13.824. I searched CourtListener’s Minnesota appellate collection by section number, by “license plate reader”, by “automated license plate”, and by the acronyms. CourtListener doesn’t carry Lelyukh at all, which tells you how big its Minnesota gaps are, and it doesn’t index district court files. So the only appellate gloss so far is one nonprecedential decision about subdivision 2(d), and most of what’s above is the statute read straight.
What it costs an agency to get this wrong
The remedies are chapter 13’s. A government entity that violates the chapter is liable for damages a person suffers, plus costs and reasonable attorney fees, and for a willful violation, exemplary damages of $1,000 to $15,000 per violation. § 13.08, subd. 1. You can also sue to compel compliance; the court may award costs and reasonable attorney fees, and if it orders compliance, it may impose a civil penalty of up to $1,000 on the agency. § 13.08, subd. 4(a). I covered how those claims get built at /news/minnesota-data-practices-building-a-civil-rights-case/.
The camera on the light pole isn’t going anywhere. The Constitution let it in. What decides how much it knows about you is a deletion clock and a public log, and somebody has to ask to see both.
Madgett Law, LLC
Madgett Law, LLC litigates civil rights and police misconduct claims in Minnesota state and federal court, and I handle Data Practices Act questions arising from government records, including requests, preservation, and actions to compel. Plate-reader data run on a 60-day clock, so if it matters to you, it matters now. Read about our civil rights practice, then send us a message.
Sources: Minn. Stat. § 13.824, subd. 1(b) (definition; private devices whose data are shared with law enforcement; traffic safety camera exclusion), subd. 1(c), subd. 2(a) (data limited; other collection prohibited), subd. 2(b) (classification), subd. 2(c) (matching; central state repository prohibited), subd. 2(d) (tracking subject of active investigation; warrant or exigent circumstances), subd. 3(a)–(d) (60-day destruction; exculpatory preservation request; chapter 5B participant request; inactive investigative data), subd. 4(a)–(c) (sharing), subd. 5(a)–(b) (public log; fixed locations), subd. 6(a)–(c) (independent biennial audit; commissioner’s review and suspension; reports), subd. 7(a)–(c) (written authorization; reasonable suspicion; public audit trail), subd. 8 (BCA notification and public list); 2015 Minn. Laws ch. 67, §§ 2–4 (enactment; effective Aug. 1, 2015); 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 127, art. 3, §§ 2–3 (traffic safety camera exclusion; subd. 2a); Minn. Stat. § 169.011, subd. 85a (traffic safety camera system); Minn. Stat. § 626.8472 (written policy required); Minn. Stat. § 138.17 (government records); Minn. Stat. § 5B.01 (address confidentiality program); Minn. Stat. § 13.02, subds. 9, 12 (nonpublic data; private data on individuals); Minn. Stat. § 13.04, subd. 3 (access by data subject; ten days); Minn. Stat. § 13.82, subd. 7 (criminal investigative data), subd. 31 (surveillance technology); Minn. Stat. § 13.05, subd. 11(a) (privatization); 2014 Minn. Laws ch. 293, §§ 2, 12 (amending § 13.05, subd. 11; effective day following final enactment); Minn. Stat. § 13.825, subd. 11(a), (c)–(d) (body-camera vendors; presumed damages); Minn. Stat. § 13.08, subds. 1, 4(a) (damages; exemplary damages; action to compel; civil penalty); Minn. Stat. § 13.09 (penalties); State v. Setinich, 822 N.W.2d 9, 12 (Minn. Ct. App. 2012); State v. Lelyukh, No. A21-0699, slip op. at 2, 5–6 & n.1, 12–14, D-1 (Minn. Ct. App. Dec. 13, 2021) (nonprecedential); Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c) (nonprecedential opinions not binding; may be cited as persuasive); Helmberger v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 839 N.W.2d 527, 531–32 (Minn. 2013); Minneapolis Office of City Auditor, State-Mandated Biennial Audit of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Automated License Plate Reader Program (Feb. 23, 2026), at 3, 6, and cover certificate (Legislative Reference Library no. 260537); Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Agencies that use License Plate Readers (LPR) (read Oct. 19, 2026); ACLU of Minnesota, Testimony to the Legislative Commission on Data Practices (Dec. 11, 2025). This article is general information about Minnesota law, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and no outcome is promised or implied.