ESP32 Privacy Tools: Detect ALPR Systems #shorts

Our Take

There's something refreshing about watching surveillance get met with a soldering iron instead of a lawsuit. STS Technologies LLC's short demo of their FlockYou device taps the ESP32 microcontroller — the same cheap, hobbyist-friendly chip powering half the DIY electronics projects on the internet — to sniff out signals associated with Flock Safety's camera network. Whether this approach reliably detects real-world ALPR deployments or just flags generic wireless chatter is something we'd want independently verified before anyone leans on it for operational security, but the instinct behind the project is exactly right: if cities and police departments won't tell you where the cameras are, build your own early-warning system.

This is part of a broader trend we're watching closely — ordinary people refusing to accept that automated license plate readers are just background noise in American life. These systems quietly log your location every time you drive past one, feeding databases that police, insurers, and sometimes private companies can query without a warrant. A $10 chip that beeps when you're near a reader won't dismantle that infrastructure, but it does something important: it makes invisible surveillance visible, even if only for the person behind the wheel.

We're always glad to see independent hardware projects chip away at ALPR opacity, and we credit STS Technologies for putting tools in people's hands rather than just complaining about the problem. If you want to know where these cameras actually are before you ever need a detector, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on ALPR expansion in your own town, our take-action page has concrete next steps.