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Our Take

Credit to Mading Thok for distilling a sprawling, confusing industry into something digestible: data brokers are the plumbing of modern surveillance capitalism, and most Americans have no idea how much of their life flows through those pipes. The $21 billion figure and California's new mass-deletion tool are worth knowing about, but we'd push the point further — this isn't just about browsing habits and credit scores. Location data, including the kind harvested by automated license plate readers, is some of the most valuable and most abused material brokers trade in.

Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks generate exactly the kind of granular, timestamped movement data that brokers covet: where you drove, when, how often, with whom. Once that data exists in a database, the question of who else can access it — law enforcement partners, private investigators, marketing firms, or future buyers nobody consented to — becomes nearly impossible to control. Opting out of a broker's mailing list doesn't un-ring that bell when the original collection point is a camera bolted to a pole on your street.

That's why we focus on mapping where these cameras actually are. Check our camera map to see what's watching your routes, and visit take action for steps to push back on ALPR deployments in your town before the data even reaches a broker's shelf.