Category: New & Scary Tech

Clear explanations of technology changes that affect New Jersey residents, including data centers, AI, and consumer tech issues.

  • New Jersey Keeps Your Plate Data for Three Years

    Drive to the grocery store in New Jersey today and there is a decent chance a camera read your license plate on the way, logged where you were and when, and filed it away. Not because you did anything. Because you drove. That is how the system is built, it reads everybody, and in this state it keeps the record for three years.

    Three years. I am going to say the comparison out loud because it is the whole story: most states hold this data about 30 days. New Jersey holds it roughly 36 times longer, in one statewide system, and you cannot look up whether your own plate has ever been searched. The cameras are not a secret. Their locations are.

    How it got this big, this quiet

    A two-person investigation at NJ.com, published July 29, 2026, did the counting that nobody in Trenton seemed in a hurry to do. They found automated license plate readers in 523 of roughly 530 law enforcement agencies in New Jersey. Nearly universal is not a figure of speech here. It is a headcount. If your town has a police department, it almost certainly has plate readers, from Flock Safety or one of the other vendors selling the same idea.

    The plumbing matters more than the cameras. Under a 2022 Attorney General directive, Directive 2022-12, every agency’s scans feed into one statewide system, NJ SNAP. Your trip to get milk in Ocean County does not stay in Ocean County. It goes into a state pool that agencies across New Jersey can search, and sharing agreements reach further than that. Edison, to pick the town currently in the fight, shares its data with 88 agencies, including federal ones and police in other states.

    The oversight is thin enough to read through. The state audit samples only a small share of searches, and skips searches run by outside agencies entirely. So the honest summary is: the state built a three-year memory of where your car has been, the public cannot see where the cameras are, and you personally cannot check whether anybody ever pulled your file. Other than that, very transparent.

    Edison is what the fight looks like

    On September 23, 2026, Edison’s council voted to expand the town’s Flock camera network from 22 cameras to 114, a contract worth roughly $589,000, which would give Edison more plate readers than any other municipality in the state. On October 14, residents showed up to the council meeting and pushed back, hard, asking the council to pause or cancel the deal. They raised the Fourth Amendment, they raised ICE, they raised the audit numbers. One councilman has talked about a local law making misuse of the data a crime.

    Edison is not an outlier. It is just the town where the meeting got loud. The same vote, quieter, has happened in hundreds of New Jersey towns, usually as a line item, usually without anybody in the audience knowing the words license plate reader were on the agenda. (Consent agendas are where democracy goes to wear sweatpants.) Washington Township in Gloucester County paid for Flock cameras and police SUVs out of its opioid settlement account, money the state says is restricted to addiction treatment and recovery. That is not a privacy argument. That is a what-did-you-buy argument, and it writes itself.

    Trenton has noticed, barely

    On September 14, 2026, Assemblyman David Bailey Jr. introduced bills that would actually change the numbers. A5481 would require stored plate data to be deleted within 180 days. A5483 goes further, a 48-hour default deletion, and it would ban private companies and individuals from running plate readers at all. Both are proposals, not law. They were introduced, they were referred, and now they sit in the part of Trenton where good ideas go to be studied until the session ends.

    New Jersey also passed the Privacy Protection Act in March 2026, which bars state agencies from sharing plate data for civil immigration enforcement. That is a real line on a real page. It is also narrower than the problem, and advocates will tell you the sharing gaps around it are wide enough to drive a searched plate through.

    What you can actually do

    You cannot opt out of being read. There is no form. But you can see part of the map. DeFlock, at maps.deflock.org, is a volunteer project that plots plate reader locations people have spotted and reported, on OpenStreetMap. It is incomplete by nature, a camera only shows up after somebody notices it, but zoom in on your town and you will learn more in two minutes than your council told you in two years.

    You can also ask, in public, on the record, at a meeting: How many cameras does this town run, where does the data go, who can search it, and how long is it kept? Those are not gotcha questions. They are the basic specs of a system pointed at every driver in town, and any official who cannot answer them is telling you something by accident.

    The flat version

    The cameras solve real crimes. Stolen cars get found, and nobody at the meeting is confused about that part. The question was never whether the tool works. The question is whether a free state keeps a three-year, statewide, searchable record of where every car has been, with secret camera locations, thin audits, and no way for you to check your own file. New Jersey answered that question without ever really asking it. The bills to shorten the three years exist. Whether they move is the next chapter, and it is being written in rooms most of us never walk into.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

    Sources:

    • NJ.com investigation by Jana Cholakovska and Gavin Schweiger (July 29, 2026): license plate readers in 523 of roughly 530 New Jersey law enforcement agencies; data retained three years under a 2022 Attorney General directive feeding one statewide system; camera locations secret; residents cannot learn whether their plate was searched; Edison shares with 88 agencies.
    • NJ Attorney General Directive 2022-12: agency ALPR scans feed the statewide NJ SNAP system, retained three years.
    • Edison Township Council (September 23, 2026 approval; October 14, 2026 meeting): Flock Safety expansion from 22 to 114 cameras, contract about $589,000, paid with asset forfeiture funds per the police chief; residents urged cancellation.
    • NJ Legislature: A5481 (delete stored ALPR data within 180 days) and A5483 (48-hour default deletion, ban on private ALPR operation), both introduced September 14, 2026.
    • NJ Privacy Protection Act (signed March 25, 2026): bars NJ government entities from sharing plate reader data for civil immigration enforcement.
    • DeFlock, volunteer ALPR map built on OpenStreetMap: https://maps.deflock.org

  • How Much Water Does a Data Center Actually Use?

    Somewhere right now there is a town meeting where a guy in a folding chair is standing up to say that a data center is going to drink his well dry, poison the aquifer, and leave his grandkids fighting over a garden hose. I am not making fun of the guy. (I have been the guy in the folding chair, about other things.) But before your town votes on one of these buildings, and towns all over this state are voting on them right now, it is worth knowing what the water numbers actually are. Because the real answer is smaller than the panic, bigger than the brochure, and weird in a way nobody at the microphone is saying.

    The question is not fringe. “Data center water usage” is searched about 9,900 times a month in this country, and it is up more than 600 percent in a year. People are not idly curious. A building the size of a small city is going up near their house and they want to know what it drinks.

    The bottle of water claim, taken apart

    The version flying around says every AI prompt you type costs about a bottle of water. That exact question, is it true that one AI prompt uses a bottle of water, gets searched roughly 8,100 times a month. Eight thousand people a month typing a rumor into Google to find out if it is real. That tells you something about where we are.

    Here is the honest version. Cooling a building full of computers takes water, and some of that water evaporates, and evaporated water is gone the way your money at the track is gone. But the per-prompt math behind the bottle claim takes the thirstiest kind of facility, in the hottest kind of place, and spreads it across your one question about a casserole recipe. Most facilities are not that facility. The claim is not a lie exactly. It is a worst case wearing a trench coat, pretending to be the average.

    What the one serious state study found

    Virginia is the data center capital of the world, so Virginia’s own legislative watchdog, JLARC, went and looked at the actual numbers and published them in December 2024. Their finding is the least exciting sentence in this whole fight, which is usually a sign it is the true one: most data centers use about as much water as a large office building.

    Sit with that. Not a reservoir. Not a river. An office building. The kind with a fountain in the lobby that has not worked since 2019.

    Now, the watchdog said most, and most is doing real work in that sentence. A few facilities use far more, and the design is the whole ballgame. A building cooled mostly by air uses very little water. A building cooled by evaporation uses a lot, especially in August. Same company, same logo on the fence, completely different drinker. Which is why the only number that matters for your town is not a national average. It is the number in that project’s permit, the ceiling the state lets them draw, in writing, before anybody breaks ground. If the people pitching the project cannot hand you that number, the meeting is not over, no matter what the clock says.

    One more fact that surprises people: according to the Congressional Research Service, about 97 percent of the water American data centers use comes from municipal systems. It is not a secret well in the woods. It is the same public water system your kitchen tap is on, which is exactly why it is a public question and not a private one.

    The water is not even the biggest bill

    Here is the part that gets lost. The fight is usually about water because water is easy to picture. But the heavier number is electricity. The International Energy Agency estimates a typical AI data center uses about as much electricity as 100,000 homes. One building. A hundred thousand homes. When a town argues about a data center, the water debate fits in a headline. The power debate is the one that shows up later, in grid upgrades and rate cases and a substation nobody budgeted for, long after the ribbon cutting photos fade.

    So no, the building is probably not going to drink your town dry, and yes, it is absolutely going to lean on your grid like it owns the place. Both things can be true. Around here, they usually are.

    What to ask before your town votes

    Ask for the permitted water draw, in gallons, in writing. Ask what kind of cooling it uses, and what it uses on the hottest week of the year, not the average week. Ask where the water comes from and what happens to it after. Ask what the power draw is and who pays for the upgrades when the grid needs them. And ask how many permanent jobs the building actually keeps once the construction crews leave, because that number has a way of shrinking between the announcement and the anniversary.

    None of that makes you anti-progress. It makes you a resident reading the fine print on a building that will outlive everybody on the council that approved it.

    The flat version

    A data center is not a vampire and it is not a toaster. Most of them drink about like an office building, a few drink like a small town, and every single one of them eats electricity like a city. The rumor about the bottle of water is a worst case dressed as an average. The real questions are local, they are in the permit, and they have numbers attached. Get the numbers before the vote, while getting them is still free.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

    Sources:

    • GridSight, Community Questions (Google Keyword Planner data, refreshed November 1, 2026): “data center water usage” about 9,900 searches per month, up 654 percent year over year; “is it true that one AI prompt uses a bottle of water” about 8,100 searches per month: https://thegridsight.com/community-questions
    • JLARC, Data Centers in Virginia (December 2024): most data centers in Virginia use about as much water as a large office building, though a few use far more; a project’s water permit sets the ceiling.
    • Congressional Research Service, R49057: about 97 percent of US data center water is municipally supplied.
    • International Energy Agency: a typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 homes.