Protect Your Mobile Privacy with RayHunter #shorts

Our Take

Credit to STS Technologies LLC for putting a spotlight on RayHunter, the EFF's open-source project that turns a $20 Orbic hotspot into a homemade stingray detector. It's a solid example of the kind of grassroots, transparent tooling we wish existed for every surveillance technology quietly deployed against the public — including the Flock Safety cameras we track every day.

IMSI catchers and ALPR networks are different technologies, but they share a playbook: deploy first, disclose later, and let the public figure out after the fact how their movements and communications are being logged. RayHunter matters because it puts detection power back in the hands of ordinary people instead of leaving it exclusively with police departments and federal agencies. That's the same reason we built our camera map — so people can actually see where ALPR surveillance is watching them instead of discovering it by accident.

Tools like this don't fix the underlying policy problem, but they shift the balance of information, even slightly, back toward the public. If you want to do more than just watch, check out our take-action page for ways to push back on unchecked camera and cell-site surveillance in your own community.