Send text messages with internet access

Our Take

This one comes from the channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, which has built a few hundred videos poking at the broader surveillance-state picture — digital ID, CBDCs, and now a quick explainer on sending texts over internet connections instead of through carrier SMS. We haven't seen the full script, so we're not going to pretend we know every technical claim made, but the instinct behind it is sound: carrier text messages route through infrastructure that logs metadata, ties messages to your phone number, and can be subpoenaed or handed over without much friction.

Here's why that matters to us at DeFlock: license plate readers don't operate in a vacuum. Flock Safety and similar networks are one piece of a much bigger surveillance mesh that includes cell tower data, carrier records, and data broker pipelines. Swapping SMS for an internet-based messaging app might shave some metadata off your digital trail, but it does nothing about the camera bolted to a pole on your street corner logging your plate, your direction of travel, and a timestamp every time you drive by — often shared across hundreds of agencies with little oversight.

Privacy is a layered problem, and no single fix — encrypted messaging, a VPN, or opting out of one database — covers you against a networked system built to track movement at scale. If you want to see how exposed your own neighborhood is, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for confronting your city council or police department about ALPR contracts.