Surveillance accountability

Who’s watching — and who has to say so.

We asked six questions of the University of Pittsburgh and four Pennsylvania peers, and filled every answer from what each one publishes. The gaps are the story: where a school is silent, and where the law lets it stay that way.

How to read this. Six questions, five schools, judged on public transparency — not on how much surveillance a campus runs. Every filled answer traces to something the school itself publishes, or to on-the-record reporting where it doesn’t; answers we searched for but could not find are marked “not located,” which is not proof the policy doesn’t exist. Policies change — verify current details before relying on this. General information, not legal advice.

Checked July 22, 2026

The six questions

What we asked of every school

The same questions apply to any campus. They move from “is there a policy at all” to the one that decides whether you can ever compel an answer.

  • Is there a public camera or surveillance policy? A written, findable policy — not just cameras on poles.
  • Any position on facial recognition? Whether the school says it uses, limits, or won’t use face-matching.
  • Are automated license-plate readers disclosed? The pole- and car-mounted cameras that log every plate that passes.
  • How long is footage kept? The retention window before recordings are overwritten.
  • Does the open-records law apply? Whether a public-records request can compel an answer — the spine of this comparison.
  • Is there a published privacy or data notice? A notice telling you what’s collected about you and how it’s handled.

The comparison

Five schools, side by side

Four Pennsylvania state-related universities — all sharing the same open-records exemption — against one fully public school whose records can be compelled. Filter to compare the two.

Show Sort
InstitutionCamera policyFacial recognitionALPRRetentionOpen-records lawPrivacy notice
PITTUniversity of PittsburghState-related · Pennsylvania Published · 20191 None published None disclosed ~28 days1 Largely exempt10 Published2
PSUPennsylvania State UniversityState-related · Pennsylvania Published · AD653 None published Flock pilot5 ≥30 days3 Largely exempt10 Published · AD534
TUTemple UniversityState-related · Pennsylvania Disclosed · portal6 States none6 Flock · portal6 30 days7 Largely exempt10 Published11
LULincoln University (Pa.)State-related · HBCU Not located Not located Not located Not located Largely exempt10 Not located
WCUWest Chester UniversityPublic · PASSHE (PA) Disclosed8 Not located Not located Not located Fully subject9 Published12

No schools match that filter.

Discloses. Publishes a policy, states a position, or is subject to open-records law — the accountable end. Third-party vendor. A private company (Flock) runs the license-plate system and holds the data — not the university. Silent / exempt. No public stance where one is expected, or exempt from the open-records law. Not located. We searched and couldn’t find it — not proof it doesn’t exist.

Reading the columns. Camera policy asks whether a written policy is published, not whether cameras exist. ALPR (automated license-plate readers): the circle marks who operates them — green for a university-run system or none confirmed, amber for a third-party vendor (Flock), which holds the plate data even where the program is publicly disclosed. Retention is the window before footage is overwritten. Open-records law is whether a public-records request can compel documents: Pennsylvania’s four state-related universities are largely exempt, while state-owned (PASSHE) universities and community colleges are subject to the general provisions of the law. Verdicts reflect what could be located from public sources, not the full extent of any program.As of July 22, 2026 — verify current details before relying on this. General information, not legal advice.

What it shows

The exemption is the floor, not the answer

All four Pennsylvania state-related universities — Pitt, Penn State, Temple, and Lincoln — sit in the same legal category: they are largely exempt from Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law, so a records request for their surveillance policies can simply be turned down. Yet what the four actually publish ranges widely — and that range is the point. The exemption sets a floor. Each school chooses where it lands above it.

Two of them run the same technology and land in very different places. Temple announced its license-plate-reader program, keeps a public transparency portal for it, and states there that it uses no facial recognition. Penn State runs a comparable Flock pilot — but it installed the cameras without announcing them, says their locations and counts are withheld “for security reasons,” and, when a student filed records requests for the governing details and audit logs, denied them. Same exemption, same vendor — opposite postures.

West Chester shows the other half of the pattern. As a state-owned (PASSHE) institution it is fully subject to the Right-to-Know Law — so even though it publishes relatively little about its own cameras, a public-records request can compel what the exempt four can simply decline to hand over. That is the whole argument: for the four state-related schools, disclosure is a choice; for the one school the law actually reaches, it is an obligation.

The license-plate column is the one that connects to the map on our advocacy page. The readers ringing campus aren’t only a city-police story: two of Pitt’s own peer institutions run them directly — one openly, one not. It’s a sharper illustration than any single camera of the lesson this whole project keeps returning to — that an open-records exemption, more than the cameras themselves, is often what stands between a community and a straight answer.

Image · optional

Screenshot of a university’s public Flock transparency portal — the Temple portal described above.
Drop the file at images/transparency/temple-flock-portal.png, then replace this block with a real <figure> + caption.

ALPRs near campus → Compare nationally → The third-party doctrine → Protect yourself →
Sources & notes

Every documented fact carries a number that matches the superscript in the table above. A cell showing a red or dashed circle with no number is a finding of absence — we searched (as of July 22, 2026) and either found nothing published or could not locate it — so there is no document to link.

  1. University of Pittsburgh — Video-Surveillance Policy (Jan 2019): law-enforcement use only, covert cameras permitted, silent on biometrics; footage retained about 28 days. safety.pitt.edu (PDF)
  2. University of Pittsburgh — University Privacy Office — posted FERPA, HIPAA, and GDPR notices. compliance.pitt.edu
  3. Pennsylvania State University — Camera policy AD65 (video retention ≥ 30 days) and the University Police video-surveillance statement. policy.psu.edu/ad65 · police.psu.edu
  4. Pennsylvania State University — Privacy policy AD53. policy.psu.edu/ad53
  5. Pennsylvania State University — University Police confirmed a Flock license-plate-reader pilot at University Park; the university says the cameras’ locations and counts are withheld, footage is kept up to 30 days, and it denied a student journalist’s records requests for the pilot’s details and audit logs. StateCollege.com · The Daily Collegian
  6. Temple University — Public Flock Safety transparency portal — lists the license-plate cameras and states the department uses no facial recognition. transparency.flocksafety.com
  7. Temple University — University statement on the license-plate program (30-day footage deletion). Temple Now
  8. West Chester University — Department of Public Safety, Electronic Security Services — installs and maintains the CCTV cameras across the 400-acre campus, monitored around the clock from the DPS communications center. wcupa.edu/dps
  9. West Chester University — As a State System (PASSHE, state-owned) university it is fully subject to the Right-to-Know Law (65 P.S. §§ 67.101 et seq.) and publishes a Right-to-Know policy. wcupa.edu/rtk
  10. Open-records law · Pennsylvania — Per the Office of Open Records, the four state-related institutions (Pitt, Penn State, Temple, Lincoln) are subject only to limited provisions of the Right-to-Know Law, so most records are not public; State System (PASSHE) universities and community colleges are subject to its general provisions, and private colleges are not covered at all. Whether a state-related university’s police force is reachable under the law is being litigated: the Office of Open Records sided with Pitt in Bard v. University of Pittsburgh Police Dept., the reporter appealed to the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, and the court heard argument in July 2026 with a decision pending; a parallel case (Pallotto / Centre Daily Times v. Penn State Police) raises the same question. openrecords.pa.gov · RCFP
  11. Temple University — University privacy statement, which also links Temple’s camera/video-imaging systems policy. temple.edu
  12. West Chester University — Web privacy policy, alongside published records-management and data-classification policies. wcupa.edu

Lincoln University (Pa.): we reviewed its Department of Public Safety and Clery pages (lincoln.edu/public-safety); no camera, facial-recognition, ALPR, or retention policy was located as of July 22, 2026. This is the Pennsylvania HBCU at lincoln.edu — not Lincoln University of Missouri.

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