They Can See Where You’ve Been…

Our Take

Credit to Sulai for boiling down the ALPR problem into one Short that anyone can understand: these cameras don't just catch the car police are looking for, they catch every car. That's the whole business model of Flock Safety and its competitors — blanket capture, not targeted search. A single hit on a wanted vehicle is the sales pitch; the quiet accumulation of everyone else's movements is the actual product.

Once a scan exists, it's a data point in a pattern-of-life record, and that record doesn't ask for a warrant to be built. It sits in a database, often shared across agencies and jurisdictions with little public oversight, waiting to be queried for reasons that have nothing to do with the crime that justified installing the camera in the first place. "Finding the right vehicle faster" sounds great until you're the innocent driver whose daily route, doctor visits, or place of worship becomes searchable history.

This is exactly why we track where these systems are actually deployed. Check our camera map to see what's watching your street, and if you want to push back, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting answers from your local government.