Living in a Border State: Why Digital Privacy Matters in Arizona

Flagstaff, Arizona, voted to end its contract with Flock Safety in 2025. Mayor Becky Daggett acknowledged that the community had lost trust in the license plate reader technology.

Flagstaff isn’t alone — it’s part of a national wave of at least 30 cities that have deactivated or canceled Flock camera contracts. But Arizona’s situation is different from Oregon’s or Massachusetts’s. Arizona is a border state, and that changes the surveillance calculus for everyone who lives here.

The Border State Factor

Arizona shares a 370-mile border with Mexico. That border shapes the surveillance environment for the entire state, not just the communities along it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection maintain heavy operational presences throughout Arizona — not just in Tucson and the border region, but in Phoenix, Flagstaff, and communities far from the border itself. These agencies access commercial databases, license plate reader networks, facial recognition systems, and data broker information to locate individuals.

Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and 60% of Arizona’s population — has a long history of aggressive immigration enforcement that predates the current political environment. The surveillance infrastructure built over decades doesn’t disappear when administrations change.

For Arizona residents, this means the commercial data that exists about you — your address, your vehicle, your daily routines — is accessible to a broader range of government agencies than in most states.

No Comprehensive Privacy Law

Arizona does not have a comprehensive state consumer data privacy law. Legislative proposals have been introduced but none have passed.

This means Arizona residents don’t have statutory deletion rights like residents of California, Virginia, or the 18 other states with comprehensive privacy laws. Opt-out requests to data brokers are voluntary on the company’s part.

Despite this, most major data brokers honor deletion requests from any state — partly because it’s easier to process all requests uniformly than to verify which state each person lives in, and partly because companies want to avoid negative publicity.

Facial Recognition in Arizona

There are no statewide restrictions on facial recognition in Arizona. Phoenix PD has used facial recognition technology in investigations, and there are documented cases of facial recognition misidentification in the Phoenix metro area.

Facial recognition misidentification is a particularly serious concern in a state with heavy law enforcement presence. A false match in a facial recognition search doesn’t just cause inconvenience — it can lead to wrongful stops, detentions, or worse.

The Flagstaff Decision

Flagstaff’s decision to end its Flock Safety contract came after community members raised concerns at city council meetings about potential surveillance overreach. Residents cited the ICE searches, the abortion tracking case in Texas, and the EFF’s analysis of protest surveillance as reasons the technology couldn’t be trusted regardless of local policies.

Mayor Daggett initially hoped to keep the cameras with additional guardrails, but ultimately acknowledged the community had lost faith in the technology. The Flagstaff decision demonstrated that surveillance pushback isn’t limited to liberal coastal cities — it resonates across the political spectrum when people understand what the technology actually does.

What Arizona Residents Should Do

Step 1: Remove yourself from data brokers. Without a state privacy law, your requests are voluntary — but most brokers honor them. Start with Spokeo, BeenVerified, WhitePages, Radaris, TruePeopleSearch, and FastPeopleSearch.

Step 2: Run a facial recognition audit. Given the Phoenix PD’s use of facial recognition and the lack of statewide restrictions, knowing where your face appears is important. Search PimEyes, FaceCheck.ID, Google Lens, Yandex, and TinEye.

Step 3: Map your license plate reader exposure. Use DeFlock.me to see where cameras are in your area. Flagstaff removed theirs, but Phoenix, Tucson, and most other communities still have them. Check plate lookup sites and opt out.

Step 4: Disable phone tracking. Turn off ad tracking. Review app location permissions — most apps don’t need your GPS. Disable location services for anything that isn’t maps or weather. In a border state, your phone’s location data is potentially accessible to a wider range of federal agencies.

Step 5: Harden your digital footprint. Private social media. Disable face tagging. Strip photo metadata. Use encrypted messaging. Disconnect linked accounts.

Step 6: Check connected car data. If you drive a newer vehicle, your car may be sharing location and driving data. Review settings in your vehicle’s companion app and disable data sharing where possible.

The Bigger Picture

Arizona’s surveillance environment reflects a broader truth: the infrastructure built for one purpose can always be used for another. Cameras installed to find stolen cars get searched for immigration enforcement. Data brokers that sell your information to advertisers also sell it to government agencies.

Flagstaff’s decision to remove its cameras was a statement that community trust matters more than technological capability. But removing cameras is only one piece of the puzzle. Your data — your face, your plate, your address, your phone’s location — exists across dozens of commercial databases that no city council can vote to shut down.

Protecting your privacy in a border state means taking personal action across every one of those vectors.