eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
(0x1) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
They're not a public body, that was my point