License plate readers appearing at Lowe's and Home Depot in Connecticut
The short version: NBC Connecticut reports Lowe's and Home Depot are quietly running license plate cameras in their parking lots, folding retail chains into the same surveillance web as cops and Flock.
Our Take
NBC Connecticut's reporting pulls back the curtain on something we've been warning about for a while now: license plate surveillance isn't just a government problem anymore, it's a retail one. Lowe's and Home Depot say the cameras are there to stop theft, but once a plate reader is bolted to a light pole in a parking lot, nobody outside that company controls where that data goes, how long it's kept, or who gets to buy access to it later. "Loss prevention" is a convenient label that makes a tracking system sound like a shrug.
This is exactly how mass surveillance normalizes itself — not with a single dramatic rollout, but with cameras showing up quietly at the places you drive to every weekend, run by companies that owe you zero transparency and face basically no oversight on retention or resale of your movements. Credit to NBC Connecticut for actually asking the question most outlets skip: who else sees this data? That's the question every shopper in that parking lot deserves an answer to.
If you want to know what's already watching you in Connecticut and beyond, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch this spread, our take-action page has real steps you can push at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of NBC Connecticut, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.