Banana on the license plate trick 🤫 🍌
The short version: A joke video about smearing bananas on plates pokes fun at 'evade the cameras' folklore, but the real fix is transparency and policy limits on ALPR dragnets, not fruit.
Our Take
Credit to Not an Undercover Cop for the bit — a banana rubbed on your plate once a week to dodge toll cameras is comedy, not a countermeasure. It lands because it pokes at a real anxiety: people know their plates are being photographed constantly, and they're grasping for folk remedies against a system most drivers never consented to and can't see the inner workings of.
Here's the catch the joke exposes: modern ALPR rigs, including the thousands of Flock Safety cameras now bolted to poles in neighborhoods nationwide, aren't just reading tolls. They're logging plate, time, and location for every car that passes, building a searchable travel history on millions of innocent people, no warrant required in most places. A banana peel won't touch that — the fix has to be legal and political, not culinary.
If this video got you wondering how many of these cameras are actually near you, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on your city council or state legislature, our take-action page has the real playbook.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Not an Undercover Cop, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.