Secrets to How to Keep Your License Plate Information Private!

Our Take

The PI Guy approaches license plate privacy from a professional investigator's angle, and that perspective is worth a watch — people who track vehicles for a living tend to know exactly how thorough these systems are. Whatever tips he offers for reducing your plate's visibility are a reasonable starting point for anyone trying to limit casual tracking, nosy neighbors, or data brokers scraping public records.

But here's the catch nobody solves with a product or a driving habit: Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks aren't reading your plate once in a parking lot — they're logging it at fixed points across entire cities, building a timestamped travel history that gets shared across agencies and sometimes sold. No amount of personal opsec changes the fact that a camera bolted to a pole on your commute is capturing you whether you like it or not. That's a policy and infrastructure problem, not just a personal privacy problem.

So treat videos like this as one layer, not the whole shield. The real fight is knowing where these cameras actually sit in your community and pushing back on their deployment. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and head to our take-action page if you want to do something about it beyond individual workarounds.