Is This the Future We Really Want?
By Ned Ryun
There is probably a camera on a pole at the entrance to your neighborhood. You’ve probably stopped noticing it. It is small, solar-powered, unremarkable, and it photographs every car that passes: yours, your neighbor’s, your teenager’s. And it reads the license plate, logs the time, and files the record in a national database. The company that owns it is called Flock Safety. Founded in 2017, valued at $7.5 billion, it now operates in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states, and its network scans roughly 20 billion vehicles a month.
Twenty billion. Each month. For perspective, there are about 290 million registered vehicles in the United States, which means the average American car is photographed, catalogued, and made searchable hundreds of times every year. Not because of a federal, state, or local warrant, not by court order, but by a subscription service your city council approved in the middle of tedious meeting never covered by any news organization and attended by a few bored citizens.
And the license plates were just the beginning.