Hidden Cameras Tracking Your Car? #shorts

Our Take

Tech Commons packs a real wake-up call into a few seconds: the license plate readers bolted to poles, signs, and intersections in your town aren't hypothetical, they're cataloged, and a community of regular people is doing the cataloging. That's the whole point of this movement — sunlight. Flock Safety and its competitors would rather you never notice the black box perched above the stop sign, logging your plate, your timestamp, your location, every single day.

What a 30-second short can't fully capture is the stakes behind that data trail. Once your travel patterns are stitched together across thousands of reads, you don't need a warrant to build a profile of someone's life — church visits, doctor appointments, who they're sleeping with, where their kid goes to school. That's the quiet danger of networked ALPR: it's not one camera, it's the aggregate map of your whole life. Grassroots documentation is one of the only checks ordinary citizens have against that kind of opaque, unaccountable tracking.

We built our own version of this effort because the work only matters if it's kept current and independent of the companies selling the cameras. Check our camera map to see what's logged near you, and if you find a reader that isn't listed, or want to push back on one going up in your community, our take-action page has concrete next steps.