Important to understand how youre tracked using your phone data
The short version: A creator breaks down how phone data tracks your movements, a reminder that ALPR networks are just one piece of a much larger surveillance puzzle.
Our Take
The channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency lays out how location data from phones gets harvested, sold, and pieced together to build a picture of where you go and who you see. We can't verify every claim or number in the video, but the broader point lines up with what we track here every day: your movements are a commodity, and multiple systems are racing to capture them.
License plate readers like Flock Safety's cameras are often sold to the public as a narrow, car-theft-and-Amber-Alert tool, but they function the same way as the phone-tracking apparatus this video describes — quietly logging where you've been, stitching it into a timeline, and handing that timeline to whoever has access, whether that's local police, federal agencies, or a private company's servers. Phone data and plate data aren't separate problems; they're two legs of the same surveillance stool, and increasingly they get cross-referenced.
If a video like this makes you uneasy about what your phone knows, you should be at least as uneasy about the cameras bolted to poles on your own street. Check our camera map to see what's been deployed near you, and visit take-action for concrete steps to push back at the city council level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.