How to Beat License Plate Readers - Why you need PhotoBloker.com Spray
The short version: A vendor-made video pitches anti-ALPR spray as a fix for plate surveillance, but the real problem is policy, not paint — and products like this can land you a ticket while doing little against modern readers.
Our Take
PhantomALERTinc's video leans on real numbers — the 2013 ACLU report on ALPR sprawl across hundreds of departments — to sell a product: PhotoBlocker spray, supposedly a way to make your plate invisible to cameras. The underlying data is legitimate and worth knowing. The pitch built on top of it is not something we'd bank on.
Sprays and coatings that claim to blind license plate readers have been tested repeatedly over the years, and the results are underwhelming at best against modern infrared-illuminated ALPR cameras, which are built specifically to punch through glare and low-light conditions. Worse, in most states, anything that obscures a plate's legibility — intentionally or not — is its own traffic violation, so you can end up trading one privacy problem for a citation that puts your name in a database anyway.
The bigger issue is that individual products can't solve a structural surveillance problem. Flock and similar ALPR networks aren't beaten with a can of spray; they're beaten with public records requests, local ordinances, and communities refusing to let this infrastructure go up unchecked. If you want to know what's actually watching your street, check our camera map, and if you want to push back where it counts, our take-action page is the better investment of your time than a spray bottle.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of PhantomALERTinc, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.