A new crowdsourced mapping tool powered by OpenStreetMap allows residents to track automated license plate readers, including tens of thousands of Flock Safety cameras deployed across U.S. neighborhoods without public awareness or consent, highlighting the rapid expansion of digital surveillance networks.
Automated license plate readers are quietly reshaping American streets, turning ordinary vehicles into searchable digital footprints. As these devices multiply on utility poles and traffic signals, a crowdsourced mapping project aims to bring visibility to infrastructure that often bypasses public debate.
How DeFlock Maps Tracks the Surveillance Apparatus
The digital tool DeFlock Maps is a crowdsourced app aiming for surveillance transparency that pinpoints automated license plate readers across neighborhoods. Operating through the open-source project OpenStreetMap, the mapping platform relies entirely on community contributors rather than corporate disclosures or government databases.
“Camera locations come from volunteers and the OpenStreetMap community, not a private company or government agency.”
DeFlock website
The platform tracks multiple hardware brands, including equipment from Motorola Solutions, Genetec, and unnamed technology firms. However, devices manufactured by Flock Safety dominate the registry, accounting for a vast majority of the pinned units. According to platform data, the site tracks 128,988 total devices, with Flock units representing the lion’s share of that inventory.
What Flock Cameras Track and Who Uses Them
Unlike traditional traffic enforcement gear, Falcon cameras don’t detect speed. Instead, the solar- or battery-powered boxes capture still images of passing vehicles, feeding data over cellular networks into cloud-hosted databases.
The resulting records convert ordinary transit into detailed digital files. Police departments, businesses, schools, and homeowners associations use the cameras, which capture license plates, vehicle makes, models, colors, direction of travel, and distinctive identifiers such as bumper stickers or body damage.
“The software analyzes images of vehicles and extracts characteristics such as license plates . . . and other distinguishing features,” Trevor Horwitz, co-founder and chief information security officer of the cybersecurity firm TrustNet, told ZDNET in an interview. “Those become searchable, allowing investigators to look for a vehicle even if they don’t have a complete license plate number.”
Trevor Horwitz, co-founder and chief information security officer of TrustNet
Industry estimates place the number of Flock-branded cameras operating across the United States at roughly 90,000, while the company itself reports a network spanning 49 states with more than 120,000 total devices. When integrated with software platforms like Motorola’s CommandCentral Aware, law enforcement agencies gain access to consolidated feeds across multiple proprietary networks.
Community Pushback and the Challenge of Ubiquitous Monitoring
The expansion of automated tracking has triggered friction between municipal authorities and local residents. In Saranac Lake, New York, public protests forced village officials to reconsider installations, ultimately resulting in a voted cancellation of the municipality’s contract with Flock Safety and the removal of the hardware. In other regions, hostility has taken more extreme forms, including incidents where an entire municipal camera fleet was stolen in one Minnesota city.
Legal and privacy experts point out that while a single camera capture reveals little more than public presence at a specific moment, an interconnected network constructs an intimate portrait of daily routines over time.
Catherine Crump, a clinical professor of technology law and director of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, told ZDNET that a network is different, particularly when it involves many cameras, because it eventually becomes a comprehensive record of a person’s movements. Crump stated that these combined movements can reveal a great deal about an individual, including where they live, work, worship, who they associate with, and how they spend their spare time.
As mapping tools make the underlying hardware visible, communities continue to weigh the investigative utility claimed by law enforcement against the passive, continuous monitoring experienced by everyday drivers.
