Private companies increasingly provide surveillance infrastructure to public law-enforcement agencies. Critically examine the accountability challenges this raises.

Policing today increasingly runs on infrastructure it does not own — cameras, automated licence-plate readers (ALPRs) and analytics supplied by private vendors. Such outsourcing genuinely expands state capability, but it moves custody of citizens' data outside the public accountability chain, making safeguards contractual rather than constitutional.

The case for private provision

• Scale and speed: Flock Safety's roughly 1,20,000 ALPRs across at least 6,000 US cities gave small departments capability they could never build in-house [1].
• Cost and expertise: India's Safe City projects in eight metros [5] and the NCRB's Automated Facial Recognition System [6] similarly depend on vendor-built systems.
• Market responsiveness: vendors can change practice faster than statutes — Flock cut default data retention from 30 days to one week in August 2026 under public pressure [2].

Accountability deficits

• Function creep: cameras justified for local crime became searchable by federal immigration authorities; Evanston discovered seven ICE searches of its data and Richmond ended federal data-sharing [1].
• Opaque audit trails: oversight rests on vendor-supplied audit tools and self-declared "search reasons", which the ACLU notes are easily circumvented [2].
• Diffused liability: the citizen has no privity with the vendor, while the agency disclaims control over a database it does not host.
• Thin legal remedy: the proportionality test in K.S. Puttaswamy (2017) [3] binds the State, yet the DPDP Act, 2023 permits exempting State instrumentalities from its obligations [4], leaving vendor-held surveillance data lightly governed.
• Democratic deficit: procurement is an administrative act; consent was restored only where councils in Austin and Denver refused renewal [1].

Private capability is not the problem — unpriced accountability is. Vendor deployment should carry statutory backing: purpose limitation, fixed retention, independent third-party audit, published transparency reports, and prior legislative or municipal sanction. Anchored in Puttaswamy's proportionality standard [3], such safeguards let surveillance technology serve Article 21 security rather than erode the liberty it protects.