Stop Reacting to Tech: How to Control Your Privacy and Data

Our Take

The Lab Tech Show frames this episode around a nice idea: tech should serve you, not the other way around. Most of the video is consumer-gadget housekeeping — an undo button in Windows 11, AirDrop coming to Android — but the item that caught our eye is the aside about the LAPD rethinking its surveillance camera deployment. That's the kind of story that rarely gets headline treatment, buried under softer lifestyle-tech news, even though it matters a lot more to your daily privacy than whether your phone can undo a delete.

We don't have the specifics on what exactly LAPD is reconsidering, and we're not going to pretend we do. But the broader point stands: police departments do walk back surveillance tools when communities organize, when costs don't pencil out, or when audits expose abuse. That almost never happens by accident — it happens because residents show up to council meetings, file records requests, and make the hardware visible instead of invisible. ALPR networks like Flock's spread largely because nobody was looking. The lesson from stories like this one is that looking is the whole game.

If you want to see what's already watching your plates in your own city, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back the way LAPD apparently had to be pushed, our take-action page has the playbook. Credit to The Lab Tech Show for putting a surveillance rollback next to the OS updates — that juxtaposition is the point.