Automatic License Plate Cameras Are Tracking You!

Our Take

Credit to the Audrey Hall Show for putting the basics of ALPR surveillance in front of a general audience. Most people have no idea that a camera bolted to a pole at the end of their street is logging their plate, location, and timestamp every single time they drive past it — and that data doesn't just vanish. It gets stored, shared, and in many cases queried by agencies far outside the town that installed the camera.

That's the real story here: this isn't a handful of cops watching for stolen cars. It's a nationwide, largely unregulated dragnet built by a private company, Flock Safety, and sold to local governments as a convenience. Once that infrastructure exists, it doesn't stay narrow. Mission creep is the rule, not the exception — data sharing agreements expand, retention windows grow, and suddenly a tool pitched for catching car thieves is being used to track people's daily movements for reasons that were never debated in public.

If this video got you wondering whether your own neighborhood has one of these cameras, check our map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back, our take action page has concrete steps for raising this with your local council before it becomes permanent infrastructure nobody remembers approving.