St. Johns County neighborhoods own at least 100 license plate readers, sheriff says

Our Take

Credit to News4JAX for surfacing a story that keeps popping up nationwide: the surveillance dragnet isn't just built by police departments, it's being crowdsourced by homeowners associations with a credit card and a Flock Safety sales rep on speed dial. Sheriff Rob Hardwick's admission that at least 100 privately-owned plate readers exist in his county, entirely separate from his department's system, is the real story here. Nobody elected an HOA board to build a tracking network, yet that's exactly what's happening in neighborhood after neighborhood, with no public records law, no council vote, and no accountability for who ends up with access to your daily movements.

The detail about a reader installed near the sheriff's own home after he reported threats is a telling irony. Law enforcement leaders understand better than anyone how exposed constant location tracking can make a person feel, yet they've done little to slow the spread of the same technology into thousands of driveways and cul-de-sacs across the country. Once that data sits on a private HOA server or gets piped into a vendor cloud, there's no guarantee it stays local, stays temporary, or stays out of the hands of anyone willing to pay for a subscription or file a broad request.

This is why we keep tracking every camera we can find, HOA-owned or otherwise, on our map. If your neighborhood has one of these systems and you don't know who controls the footage, that's a problem worth raising at the next HOA meeting. Check our take-action page for tools to push back before another hundred cameras get bolted to another hundred street signs.