FAAC Boom Barrier with ANPR – Smart Automatic License Plate Recognition!

Our Take

Gaido Technologies' demo reel isn't about Flock, but it's the same story from a different angle: license plate readers are becoming a default add-on for anything with a gate. Apartment complexes, office parks, and parking garages are being sold ANPR the same way they're sold key fobs — as a convenience upgrade — but the fine print in the pitch is telling. The company's own copy brags about "real-time vehicle tracking," which is a polite way of saying every car that passes through gets logged, time-stamped, and stored somewhere.

This is how mass surveillance infrastructure actually spreads — not through one big government mandate, but through thousands of small private purchases at gated communities and corporate lots, each one adding another node to a de facto tracking network with zero public oversight, no retention limits, and no accountability for who gets access to the data later. Nobody votes on this. A property manager just picks it off a vendor's product page.

Worth asking before your HOA or employer signs a contract: where does that plate data go, who can query it, and how long is it kept? If you want to see how dense this kind of tracking already is in your area, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a new install near you, our take-action page has a starting point.