Surveillance in Florida: What Is Legal, What Is Not

Florida law, like every state, recognizes that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. A licensed PI may photograph or video-record any person in any public place — sidewalk, parking lot, restaurant patio visible from the street, the entrance to a hotel — without their knowledge or consent. That footage is admissible in civil and criminal proceedings.

This rule covers most of what infidelity, workers' comp, and child-custody surveillance actually involves: documenting where the subject goes, when, and with whom, from a public vantage point.

Florida Statute § 810.145 makes it a crime to record someone in a place where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy — restrooms, dressing rooms, the interior of their home, hotel rooms, and similar locations — even from outside, even with a long lens. This is the 'video voyeurism' statute, and Florida prosecutors take it seriously.

A long-lens shot of the subject through a bedroom window is not surveillance evidence — it is a felony. A reputable PI will not take that shot. If you find one who will, do not hire them; the footage is inadmissible and your case is compromised before it begins.

Under Florida Statute § 934.03, intercepting or recording an 'oral communication' requires the consent of all parties to that communication. This is one of the strictest wiretap statutes in the country.

What this means in practice: video with no audio is fine. Audio of a conversation the PI is not a party to and that the parties did not consent to is a felony. PI body-cam audio of a confrontation between the PI and the subject — where both know they are speaking with each other in public — is more complicated and case-specific.

If a client comes to us with a recording they made of a spouse or business partner without their knowledge, we have to have a careful conversation about whether and how that recording can be used. Often it cannot — and in some cases possessing it creates exposure for the client.

Clients ask us constantly to 'put a tracker on his car.' The legal rule in Florida, post-Jardines and post-Carpenter, is straightforward: a GPS tracker may be placed on a vehicle only by the owner of the vehicle (which means a vehicle titled jointly by a married couple is jointly owned for this purpose) or with the express consent of the owner.

Putting a GPS tracker on a vehicle you do not own and do not have authorized consent to track is a stalking offense under Florida Statute § 784.048 and creates civil liability. Florida specifically criminalized non-consensual GPS tracking in 2015.

The owner-consent route is real and is used in legitimate cases — corporate fleet vehicles, parents tracking minor children's cars, jointly-titled marital vehicles before separation. We document the consent in writing every time.

Florida Statute § 934.50, the 'Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act,' specifically prohibits using a drone to record a person on their privately-owned property in a manner that violates their reasonable expectation of privacy. Drone footage from public airspace of a public location is fine. Drone footage looking into someone's fenced backyard is not.

FAA Part 107 commercial rules also apply. Anyone flying a drone commercially for surveillance — which is what PI use is — must hold a Part 107 remote pilot certificate. Hobbyist rules do not cover paid investigative work.

The evidence that holds up shares three properties: it was obtained legally; the chain of custody is documented from capture to presentation; and the investigator who captured it is qualified and available to testify. Florida courts have admitted thousands of hours of PI surveillance footage on this foundation. They have also excluded plenty when any of those three properties were missing.

The reason we run our cases under written protocols, time-stamped logs, and licensed-investigator-only fieldwork is precisely so the work survives a motion to suppress.