Flock & ALPR Cameras in Foster City, California
Volunteers have reported 44 automated license plate readers in and around Foster City — cameras that log every passing plate with a time and location.
Jurisdiction · by recorded street address
The 45 cameras counted on this page are every reader mapped within about 20 kilometres of Foster City, so the count crosses municipal lines. By the street address recorded for each one, 24 of them sit inside Foster City itself.
The rest sit in San Mateo (21).
30 of them name an operator in the record: Foster City Police Department (13), San Mateo Police Department (12), Home Depot (4), San Mateo PD (1). The operator is who runs the camera, which is not always the local government.
Source: community-mapped camera data (OpenStreetMap, ODbL), with addresses resolved by Nominatim.
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- Sep 9 Flock Safety camera newly reported
- Sep 9 Flock Safety camera newly reported
Newly reported by volunteers — cameras may have been up long before someone mapped them.
Where the cameras are in Foster City
The readers mapped around Foster City break down as 38 Flock Safety, 4 CoStar, 3 Bosch Security Systems. Named operators in the reports: Foster City Police Department, San Mateo Police Department, Home Depot, San Mateo PD. The first camera here was reported in Jun 2025; the most recent in Sep 2026.
- East Hillsdale Boulevard — 7 readers
- South Norfolk Street — 7 readers
- San Mateo - Hayward Bridge — 6 readers
- Chess Drive — 5 readers
- East 3rd Avenue — 4 readers
- Metro Center Boulevard — 3 readers
- Fashion Island Boulevard — 3 readers
- Franklin Parkway West — 2 readers
- Bridgepointe Circle — 2 readers
- Edgewater Boulevard — 1 reader
- Emerald Bay Lane — 1 reader
- Mariners Island Boulevard — 1 reader
+ 3 more streets and roads mapped around Foster City — all on the live map above.
Foster City CA PD and the sharing network
Per Flock’s own transparency portal, Foster City CA PD appears in the sharing network with connections to 108 other agencies.
Foster City in the San Mateo County picture
San Mateo County has 628 reported cameras county-wide and ranks #164 of 3,222 U.S. counties for cameras per resident, inside the top 7.6% nationally. That’s across 745,100 residents and 1,847 road miles. By road density that is 0.34 cameras per road mile, in the top 0.4% of counties nationally.
Where contributors recorded what a camera watches, the split here is 28 traffic, 14 street. Operators named on the record: Foster City Police Department (13), San Mateo Police Department (12), Home Depot (4).
Camera activity around Foster City, last 30 days
5 newly reported in our hourly change log for Foster City. Latest change logged Sep 9, 2026.
What’s watching Foster City
These aren’t red-light cameras. Automated license plate readers like Flock Safety’s photograph every plate that passes, log the time and place, and store it in a searchable database that’s often shared far beyond Foster City — here’s where that data goes. Counts cover cameras reported closest to Foster City (within ~20 km), so nearby towns share the same corridors. Spot one that’s missing? Report it on DeFlock.
The latest around Foster City
What you can do in Foster City
Ask who approved these cameras, how long plate data is kept, and who it’s shared with. File a public records request, raise it at a council meeting, and see the full playbook on Take Action. Fighting this locally? Join or start a chapter and we’ll amplify you.
Not sure what one looks like? See photographs of installed cameras before you go looking.
Cameras near Foster City
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Camera reports: the open-source DeFlock project. Place data: GeoNames (CC BY).