Your Phone is the New License Plate. Police Tracking Your Personal Devices at Flock Traffic Cameras

Our Take

Credit to Mumford Law for flagging something we've been watching closely: Flock Safety isn't content with just reading plates anymore. If Signal Trace does what the marketing implies — picking up phone signals at the same intersections where cameras already log your car — that's a meaningful escalation. It means the surveillance dragnet no longer needs a license plate to identify you. Your phone becomes the tracking token, whether you're driving, walking, or riding a bike past one of these poles.

This matters because the entire public justification for ALPR networks has always rested on the narrow claim that they're just reading plates in public — nothing more invasive than a human eye could see. Adding device-level tracking blows past that argument entirely. Now the same networks quietly wired into thousands of neighborhoods can potentially build a profile of who was near a camera regardless of what they were driving, or whether they were driving at all. That's a profound shift in scope, and it happened without any real public debate.

We don't yet know the technical specifics of how broadly this is deployed or how the data gets used downstream, and we're not going to speculate past what's confirmed. But the trajectory is the point: these systems keep expanding capability quietly, then normalize it after the fact. If you want to know whether Flock or similar camera systems are already active near you, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for engaging your city council before these systems expand further unchecked.