Rankings

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

We asked six questions of the University of Pittsburgh, four Pennsylvania peers and five public universities in other states, and filled every answer from what each one publishes. The blanks 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

Pennsylvania: Pitt and four peers

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

Institution	Camera policy	Facial recognition	ALPR	Retention	Open-records law	Privacy 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. 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.

The comparison

Five other states, five public universities

A starting set, checked against each institution’s own materials. The common thread: every one is a government agency subject to its state’s records law — the opposite of Pennsylvania’s state-related exemption.

Institution	Camera policy	Facial recognition	ALPR	Retention	Open-records law	Privacy notice
UCLAUniversity of California, Los AngelesPublic · California	Published · Policy 133¹³	No live FR¹³	Published · Policy 134¹³	30–90 days¹³	Subject · CPRA¹⁸	Published¹⁹
UFUniversity of FloridaPublic · Florida	Disclosed²⁰	States none¹⁶	Published · LPR¹⁶	~30 days²⁰	Subject · FL records¹⁸	Published²¹
UNCUNC–Chapel HillPublic · North Carolina	Published¹⁴	States none¹⁴	Flock · 23 cams¹⁴	30 days¹⁴	Subject · NC PRA¹⁴	Published²²
UTDUT DallasPublic · Texas	Not located	States none¹⁵	Flock · portal¹⁵	Not located	Subject · TX PIA¹⁸	Published²³
UWUW–MadisonPublic · Wisconsin	Disclosed · FAQ¹⁷	States none¹⁷	Flock · ended Jul 2026¹⁷	Not located	Subject · WI records¹⁸	Published²⁴

Reading the columns. Camera policy asks whether a written policy is published, not whether cameras exist. ALPR is 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 regardless of how openly the program is disclosed. Open-records law is whether a public-records request can compel documents — here, every school is a public agency subject to its state’s records law, the reverse of Pennsylvania’s state-related exemption. Verdicts reflect what could be located from public sources, not the full extent of any program.As of July 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 release. 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.

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

What it shows

The exemption stops at the state line

The tool is nearly everywhere. Flock license-plate readers now ring public campuses coast to coast — UNC–Chapel Hill, UT Dallas, the University of Florida, and UW–Madison all run them — and the systems behave the same way wherever they go: they read plates, not faces, and hold the data for a matter of weeks. On the surface, a student at any of these schools faces roughly the same cameras a Pitt student does.

What differs first is posture. Some schools publish a detailed account of their program — UW–Madison keeps a public FAQ, and UCLA’s written camera policy goes so far as to bar live facial recognition outright. Others disclose almost nothing until they’re pushed: UNC refused to release its Flock contract, telling a newspaper there were no responsive records, until a media attorney intervened and the university produced them.

But the deeper difference isn’t the campus — it’s the law standing behind it. In every state on this table, the public university is a government agency squarely subject to the state’s public-records law, so a request can ultimately compel the documents, as the UNC episode shows. That is precisely what Pennsylvania’s four state-related universities are largely exempt from. Put plainly: a student at UNC, Florida, or UW–Madison has a legal right to ask that a student at Pitt, Penn State, Temple, or Lincoln does not. The Pennsylvania table above is the other half of this story.

This is a starting set — five universities across five states, checked against each institution’s own materials as of July 2026. We’ll keep adding schools and states, and the interesting cases will be the exceptions: a state that shields campus-police records even though it’s otherwise open, or a school that publishes far more than the law requires.

The Pennsylvania table → ALPRs near our campus → Privacy by state →

Sources & notes

Every documented fact carries a number that matches the superscript in the tables 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.

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)
University of Pittsburgh — University Privacy Office — posted FERPA, HIPAA, and GDPR notices. compliance.pitt.edu
Pennsylvania State University — Camera policy AD65 (video retention ≥ 30 days) and the University Police video-surveillance statement. policy.psu.edu/ad65 · police.psu.edu
Pennsylvania State University — Privacy policy AD53. policy.psu.edu/ad53
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
Temple University — Public Flock Safety transparency portal — lists the license-plate cameras and states the department uses no facial recognition. transparency.flocksafety.com
Temple University — University statement on the license-plate program (30-day footage deletion). Temple Now
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
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
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
Temple University — University privacy statement, which also links Temple’s camera/video-imaging systems policy. temple.edu
West Chester University — Web privacy policy, alongside published records-management and data-classification policies. wcupa.edu

UCLA — Policy 133, Safety and Security Camera Systems: facial-recognition technology “will not be used for live scanning,” and recorded images are kept no less than 30 and no more than 90 days. Automated license-plate readers are governed separately by UCLA Policy 134, a university-run system operated by Events & Transportation for parking management. adminpolicies.ucla.edu (Policy 133) · Policy 134
UNC–Chapel Hill — Published Security Camera Policy; a Feb 2024 contract installed 23 Flock license-plate readers on campus (Flock states its readers use no facial recognition); NC law caps ALPR retention at 90 days and the campus system holds plates about 30. The university initially refused to release the Flock contract, citing no responsive records, until a media attorney forced disclosure. policies.unc.edu · GovTech / News & Observer
UT Dallas — The University Police Department publishes an automated license-plate-reader (Flock) information page; Flock states its readers do not perform facial recognition. police.utdallas.edu
University of Florida — Publishes a license-plate-reader page under its campus Security and Safety Plan; the readers capture vehicle data only, not faces (the system operator is not identified in public sources). security.businessaffairs.ufl.edu
UW–Madison — UWPD publishes a detailed Flock FAQ: eight cameras, access restricted to department personnel and logged and audited, and explicitly no facial recognition. uwpd.wisc.edu
Open-records law — Unlike Pennsylvania’s largely-exempt “state-related” universities, public universities in these states are government agencies generally subject to their state’s public-records law (California’s CPRA, the North Carolina Public Records Act, the Texas Public Information Act, Florida’s public-records law, and Wisconsin’s public-records law). The UNC contract dispute [14] shows the law reaching a campus in practice. Compare the Pennsylvania exemption in the Pennsylvania table above page.
UCLA — Official University Privacy Policy & Terms of Use, covering personal information collected through UCLA websites. ucla.edu
University of Florida — Security & Surveillance Cameras page: the camera system runs on the Genetec Security Center platform and footage is centrally retained about 30 days. security.businessaffairs.ufl.edu
University of Florida — Online/Internet Privacy Statement, maintained by the UF Privacy Compliance Office. privacy.ufl.edu
UNC–Chapel Hill — University Online Privacy Statement (Institutional Privacy Office). unc.edu
UT Dallas — Privacy at UT Dallas, the university’s website privacy notice. utdallas.edu
UW–Madison — University Privacy Notice. wisc.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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