FlockYou Display ALPR Awareness Detector with 2” IPS Screen #eff #rayhunter #mobileprivacy #cell

Our Take

Credit where it's due: STS Technologies LLC has built something genuinely useful for the privacy-conscious driver. The FlockYou Display, running on an M5Stack ESP32 board, passively sniffs 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi traffic for signatures associated with ALPR hardware and flashes or beeps when it finds one. No app, no cloud account, no recurring fee to some third party harvesting your location data in the name of protecting you from location data harvesting. That's the right instinct — tools for resisting surveillance shouldn't themselves become surveillance products.

What makes this notable isn't just the hardware spec sheet — 2-inch IPS screen, speaker, rechargeable battery, USB-C — it's the philosophy behind it. Open-source, locally-processed detection means anyone can audit what the device actually does, modify it, or build their own. That's the opposite of the black-box approach Flock Safety and similar vendors take with the cameras themselves, where the public rarely gets to see how detections are made, stored, or shared with police departments and federal agencies.

A gadget like this is a stopgap, not a solution — it can only flag what it can detect, and ALPR vendors aren't obligated to make that easy. The real fix is transparency and policy: knowing where these cameras are, who controls the data, and pushing back through public records and local council meetings. Check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to do more than just get a beep when you drive past one.