Your town bought the license plate cameras in public. Nobody ever put them on a map.

Our Take

Credit to Flock Clocker for stating the quiet part out loud: license plate readers are procured through public council votes, public budgets, and public press releases, but the second they're bolted to a pole, they vanish from public knowledge. There's no requirement that a city publish coordinates, no standard disclosure, nothing. You're expected to just trust that a network of cameras logging your movements exists somewhere "out there" and not worry about where.

That gap between "bought in public" and "documented in public" is exactly the problem. Procurement paperwork sits in a council meeting's minutes for thirty days and then gets buried. Meanwhile the hardware stays up for years, feeding a searchable database of everyone's travel patterns to any agency with access — and increasingly, to agencies far outside the city that approved it. If nobody maps it, nobody can meaningfully oversee it, challenge it, or even know it's there to ask questions about.

This is the entire reason crowdsourced mapping projects exist. If cities won't volunteer the information, residents have to go find the cameras themselves and put them somewhere permanent and visible. Check our camera map to see what's already been logged near you, and if your town's readers aren't on it yet, that's a gap worth closing — see how to help.