By Daniel Nuccio
A bipartisan bill under consideration in the Colorado General Assembly would limit the government’s use of historical location information after tracking people in the state.
Known as the “Protecting Everyone from Excessive Police Surveillance (PEEPS) Act,” the bill was introduced on January 28, 2026 and sponsored by Colorado state senators Judy Amabile and Lynda Zamora Wilson, along with state representatives Yara Zokaie and Kenny Nguyen.
As introduced, the PEEPS Act would restrict law enforcement agencies’ warrantless access to personally identifiable location information captured more than 24 hours in the past, limit data retention beyond four days outside of narrowly defined exceptions, restrict data sharing, and require annual reports on the use of relevant data-collection tools.
“Technological advances and the growth of commercial data systems have enabled the routine collection, aggregation, storage, and sale of historical location information relating to individuals and vehicles, including information derived from cameras, license plate readers, cellular networks, and other technologies,” the bill states.
The original version of the bill also mentioned facial recognition data as a threat to individual privacy.
“Historical location information is highly sensitive in nature and, when accessed over time, can reveal detailed and personal information about an individual’s movements, associations, habits, and daily activities,” the bill states.
Motivations: Privacy and Guardrails
Rep. Nguyen says governments’ collection of this data endangers people’s privacy rights.
“I was motivated to sign on with this bill in fear of our data and privacy being infringed by a third party,” Nguyen told Government & Liberty.
Nguyen expressed concerns about data being “sold to the highest bidder” and how it might be shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the United States Department of Homeland Security.
Nguyen says he believes in the kinds of guardrails the PEEPS Act would establish through the requirement of a judicial warrant for law enforcement to access older historical location information and the limit on data retention.
“We’ve received massive support from the community and seen a surge of towns and counties withdraw access and permission in using these new technologies due to concerns with privacy of their communities,” Nguyen said.
Narrowed Focus: ALPRs
After its hearing in the Colorado Senate Committee on Judiciary, a preamended version of the Colorado’s PEEPS Act was posted to the General Assembly’s website on February 24, 2026.
A preamended bill is defined on the Colorado General Assembly website as legislation that “reflects the amendments recommended by a committee of reference before the committee report has been voted on by the Committee of the Whole.”
Unlike the initial version of the bill, which sought to regulate several forms of surveillance technologies, the preamended bill deals solely with the use of automatic license plate readers, sometimes referred to as ALPRs, license plate readers, or LPRs. It allows for warrantless access to data collected through ALPRs for up to 72 hours after collection, as opposed to 24 hours, and the retention of collected data for 30 days instead of four.
ALPRs are defined by the preamended bill as “a system, software, or computer algorithm … used to convert images of license plates, vehicle characteristics, or vehicle occupants into computer-readable data.”
The Institute for Justice describes ALPRs as cameras that “photograph every vehicle that drives by and can use artificial intelligence to create a profile with identifying information that then gets stored in a massive database.”
ALPR Opposition
The use of automatic license plate readers has been unsuccessfully challenged by lawsuits brought by the Liberty Justice Center and the Institute for Justice in Illinois and Virginia, respectively. Attorneys with both organizations previously told Government & Liberty they are appealing those decisions.
The Institute for Justice has also initiated a “Plate Privacy Project.”
“As part of our Project on the Fourth Amendment, the Institute for Justice (IJ) is challenging the government’s arbitrary power to use ALPRs to surveil the entire driving public in court, helping activists push back against the deployment of license plate readers, working with legislators on model bills to protect Fourth Amendment rights, and shedding light on the issue through the media,” states the project’s website.
Michael Soyfer, an attorney involved in the IJ’s fight against ALPRs, says gathering and storing this information is unconstitutional.
“In our view there is an injury to people from having their movements stored in a government database without any suspicion,” told Government & Liberty. “The framers of our Constitution certainly would have regarded searches of that type as unconstitutional, as unlawful, as gross violations of government power.”
“In their own time [the framers] had a very strong counter-reaction to the widespread use of general warrants and writs of assistance, because those often allowed suspicion-less searches, not just because they gave a lot of discretion to the officer,” said Soyfer. “And that’s truly what these systems do. … They allow fishing expeditions. They allow searches without suspicion. They put a deep record of all of our movements … in the hands of every officer who can just go in and search for really any reason, whether it’s idle curiosity, a hunch, whatever it may be.”
The preamended version of Colorado’s PEEPS Act is a good start in protecting these rights, says Soyfer.
“We think it’s still an enormous improvement over existing law,” said Soyfer. “Although we believe the bill should do more, the sponsors worked very hard, given the political dynamics they face, to strike a compromise that bolsters protections for Coloradans’ privacy against unreasonable, dragnet surveillance.”
