- A nationwide surveillance system may know where you drive, when you leave home and which places you visit, without you ever realizing you were being watched.
More than 117,000 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are scattered across America, according to a map.
The roadside devices photograph passing vehicles and record their license plates, locations and precise time of travel, allowing separate sightings to be pieced together into a detailed journey.
Privacy advocates warn that the system can create a searchable record of people’s everyday movements.
While police say the technology helps locate stolen vehicles and criminal suspects, civil liberties groups argue that innocent motorists can also be swept into the system and their movements searched without officers first obtaining a warrant.
California emerged as one of the country’s most heavily monitored states, with more than 16,000 readers documented along major roads, at intersections and on routes leading into populated areas, according to DeFlock, which created the map.
Florida followed with 7,169 cameras, Georgia with 7,046 and Illinois with 5,822.
Flock Safety devices, which are advanced ALPRs, account for 97,077 of the documented cameras, nearly 83 percent of the map’s total of 117,256. Overall, the database includes devices associated with 85 brands.
DeFlock is an open-source project that compiles camera locations submitted by members of the public and drawn from sources including OpenStreetMap.
However, its database is crowdsourced and does not include every operating reader, meaning areas with more active contributors may appear more heavily monitored than places where fewer cameras have been reported.
Garrett Langley, chief executive and co-founder of Flock Safety, said in a previous statement: 'I take nothing more seriously than the values we built this company upon, to give cities tools to uphold public safety, while enabling accountability and transparency.
'Public safety does no
