The Sunday morning run to Home Depot is one type of errand that feels almost ceremonial in American culture. The slow drift past contractors loading lumber into pickup trucks, coffee in the cupholder, and a haphazard supply list. By all reasonable standards, it is among the most commonplace things a person can do. However, it might also be one of the most covertly monitored, according to a class action lawsuit filed on May 1 in federal court in California.
Lead plaintiff William Schmierer and four other customers filed the complaint, accusing Home Depot of conducting a “covert surveillance operation” in the parking lots of its California locations. The accusations are remarkably specific, and the mechanism is automated license plate recognition technology, or ALPR in the increasingly popular acronym. Plaintiffs claim that the cameras record much more than just a license plate number. After recording the make, model, color, distinguishing characteristics, timestamps, and exact locations of the vehicles, they compile the data into a centralized database that is searchable by law enforcement organizations across the country.
The lawsuit’s advantage stems from the scope of that data-sharing pipeline. According to reports, the system in question is connected to Flock Safety, a name that has been appearing in privacy cases all over the nation with a frequency that no longer seems accidental. The 57-page complaint claims that Home Depot violated California’s Automated License Plate Recognition Privacy Act in almost every significant way, including by failing to designate a custodian for the system, defining a retention period, and providing no real restrictions on what federal or out-of-state agencies could retrieve from the database.
Reading the filing gives the impression that the plaintiffs are more concerned with what Home Depot has become a node within than with Home Depot itself. The lawsuit claims that ALPR networks have been used to support immigration enforcement and keep an eye on protest activity. Although the company has openly denied working with federal immigration authorities, the lawsuit makes a more nuanced claim that such denials are structurally flawed due to the system’s architecture. Home Depot is no longer solely responsible for who swims in the pool once the data is in it.
That’s the part that stays. Retailers have always monitored foot traffic, loyalty cards, and the little deals of contemporary business. A license plate, however, is not the same. It follows you back to your house. It records your location on a Tuesday afternoon, the route you took, and whether you made any prior stops. When combined over time, the image becomes unsettlingly full.
This is not unique to Home Depot, which is one of the reasons the case seems like a warning sign. Lowe’s is implementing similar AI-powered license plate systems, and retailers have a legitimate, quantifiable reason to want them, according to reporting surrounding the lawsuit. One Southern California operation mentioned in coverage involved 14 people arrested for about 600 thefts across 71 stores, totaling more than $10 million in losses. Retail crime that is organized is real. The cameras are not chosen at random. However, the lawsuit aims to close the gap between “we’re tracking thieves” and “we’re tracking everyone who enters the lot, indefinitely, and sharing it widely”.
It’s still unclear how California courts will balance the company’s claimed security defenses against the particular procedural requirements of the ALPR Privacy Act. The plaintiffs are attempting to represent the millions of customers whose plates were photographed at a California Home Depot during the class period. Regardless of the result, the case raises an issue that the retail sector has so far avoided publicly addressing: what precisely are we consenting to when we pull into the parking lot?
