Call me paranoid! We’re in a police surveillance state. Look at these cameras at Lowe’s.

Our Take

It doesn't take a conspiracy theory to notice that the cameras watching you at the hardware store aren't always just loss-prevention gear. James Madison Media's walk-through of the cameras at Lowe's is a useful reminder that retail parking lots have quietly become nodes in a much bigger surveillance network, one that often includes license plate readers feeding data to police departments and private companies alike.

The "call me paranoid" framing is doing real work here. People who ask basic questions about camera placement and data-sharing get waved off as tinfoil-hat types, even though the infrastructure is sitting in plain sight above the cart corral. Flock Safety and similar vendors have made a business model out of blanketing everyday commercial spaces with ALPR cameras, often with little public disclosure about who can access the footage or how long it's kept.

Thanks to James Madison Media for pointing a camera back at the cameras. If you want to see how dense this network already is in your area, check our map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked plate tracking in your community, our take-action page is a good place to start.