Dealer hid a tracker on your new car not good
The short version: A YouTube creator exposes dealership-installed trackers on new cars, a reminder that vehicle surveillance starts long before you ever pass a Flock camera.
Our Take
The channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency flags something a lot of new car buyers never think to check: dealerships quietly installing GPS trackers on vehicles before they're even sold. Credit to the creator for digging into this — it's the kind of consumer-level surveillance story that rarely makes mainstream coverage, even though it affects anyone who's financed a car in the last decade.
This matters to us because it's the other half of the tracking equation. Flock Safety cameras and ALPR networks build a record of where your car goes on public roads, city by city, intersection by intersection. A hidden dealer tracker does the same thing from inside the vehicle itself, often tied to financing agreements or "recovery" features buried in fine print. Combine the two and you've got a car that's broadcasting your location from the dashboard while also getting photographed and logged every time it passes a pole-mounted camera. Neither system asked for your informed consent, and neither is going away on its own.
If you want to see how exposed your own routes already are, check our camera map to find ALPR locations near you, and head to our take-action page for concrete steps — from public records requests to city council pushback — that chip away at both halves of this surveillance stack.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.