You need a faraday bag every personal item is being tracked

Our Take

The channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency makes the case that nearly everything in your pocket — phone, key fob, even some wallets — is broadcasting your location to someone, somewhere. Whether or not you buy every claim in the video, the underlying worry is legitimate: location data has become a commodity, and most of us never agreed to sell ours. We'll leave the product recommendations to them, but the framing matters for anyone who already thinks about license plate readers, because a faraday bag does nothing to stop the camera bolted to a pole on your commute.

That's the blind spot in a lot of 'protect your privacy' advice: it focuses on the device in your hand and ignores the infrastructure built into the road itself. Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks don't need your phone to pick you up — they read your plate, timestamp it, and stash the record in a database that police departments and private subscribers can query well after the fact, often with little judicial oversight. You can turn off location services and still end up in a pattern-of-life report built entirely from camera hits.

Videos like this one are useful because they keep the broader surveillance conversation alive, even when the solutions on offer are partial. The real fix isn't just shielding your own gear — it's knowing where this infrastructure already exists in your community and pushing back on it locally. Check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you want to do something about it beyond buying a bag, our take-action page has concrete next steps.