A Cop Used Plate Cameras to Stalk Her 🚔📸 #Surveillance #Privacy #Tech

Our Take

Credit to Sly Decodes for laying out exactly how this happens: a network built to hunt stolen cars turned into a stalking tool because the only thing standing between 'I need this for an investigation' and 'I want to know where my ex-girlfriend is right now' is an honor-system text field. No warrant, no supervisor sign-off in real time, no independent check — just a cop typing whatever reason he feels like before the system hands him live location pings on a private citizen's car.

This is the part Flock Safety and its law enforcement partners keep glossing over when they tell city councils these networks are 'audited.' An audit trail that only gets reviewed after someone almost dies in a 70 mph chase isn't oversight, it's a paper trail for a lawsuit. The billions of plate scans a month, the 30-day searchable window, the hundred-plus thousand cameras from one vendor alone — none of that matters if the access controls are this thin. The tech doesn't need to be hacked to be abused. It just needs one person with a badge and bad intentions.

If your town has these poles going up, you deserve to know who's watching and how easy it is for that access to be misused. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and hit up take action for ways to push back before your local department gets its own 'shiny thing' story.