They don't want you driving old cars they cannot track
The short version: A UK/US surveillance-focused channel argues the push toward connected, trackable cars makes older, 'untrackable' vehicles a target — and ALPR networks like Flock already close that gap.
Our Take
The channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency raises a point we think about constantly here: you don't need a car with built-in telematics to be tracked. Whatever the regulatory pressure on older vehicles turns out to be, the on-the-ground reality is that Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks already make the age or 'connectedness' of your car irrelevant. A 1998 Civic with no chip in it gets logged, time-stamped, and stored in a database just as thoroughly as a brand-new EV phoning home to its manufacturer.
That's the uncomfortable overlap between the 'smart car' surveillance conversation and the camera-on-every-corner conversation this video's channel usually lives in: even if you opt out of one tracking system by keeping an old car, you're opted into another one just by driving past a pole-mounted reader. The infrastructure doesn't care what's under your hood — it cares about your plate, your route, and your pattern of life, all of it retained and searchable by police and increasingly by private networks with little oversight.
Credit to the creator for connecting dots that mainstream coverage usually treats as separate stories. We'd add one thing: you can check whether this is already happening on your own street. Look up your area on our camera map, and if you want to push back on a deployment near you, our take-action page has steps that actually move local decision-makers.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.