The Private Companies Tracking Every Car In America: Your Vehicle's Location Is Being Sold For Profit

Introduction

Every morning you drive to work, you pass maybe a dozen traffic lights, a few intersections, some highway overpasses. You're thinking about your meeting, your coffee, whether you remembered to lock the back door. You're not thinking about the fact that you're being photographed—systematically, automatically, and permanently. Not by red-light cameras. Not by speed traps. By a nationwide network of automated license plate readers that's been quietly documenting everywhere you go, building a database of your movements that spans months or years. These aren't government-owned systems subject to oversight. They're operated by private companies worth billions, and they're selling access to your location history to thousands of police departments, federal agencies, and private investigators. Most of this happens without warrants. Almost none of it requires suspicion of a crime. The infrastructure is already built. Flock Safety—one company—operates nearly 90,000 cameras across 7,000 networks as of July 2025. Vigilant Solutions, their main competitor, maintains a database with over 2 billion vehicle detections that grows by 70 million per month. Together, these systems scan approximately one billion license plates every month. If you drive regularly in the United States, your vehicle is in these databases. The question isn't whether you're being tracked—it's who has access to that data, what they're doing with it, and how long they're keeping it. The answers should scare the hell out of you.

The Business Model: Turning Your Neighborhood Into a Surveillance Node

Flock Safety started in 2017 as an Atlanta startup. Eight years later, it's valued at $3.5 billion. Their pitch is clean, simple, seductive: technology that keeps your neighborhood safe from crime. One camera costs $2,500 per year, plus a $350 installation fee. For cities, the price scales fast—Houston approved a five-year contract for up to $6.4 million to lease 318 cameras. Here's what the sales pitch doesn't emphasize: when your HOA or local police department buys a Flock camera, they're not just monitoring your street. They're feeding data into a national network accessible by thousands of out-of-state agencies and federal authorities. The camera watching your cul-de-sac isn't just catching car thieves in your zip code—it's cataloging every vehicle that passes and sharing that data with police departments in states you've never visited. Over 200 homeowners associations nationwide have installed Flock's cameras, according to an Intercept investigation. HOAs collect over $100 billion per year from homeowners, and surveillance companies have learned to target that budget. It's an elegant workaround: HOAs are private entities, so they're not subject to public records requests or the limited regulations that apply to law enforcement. Your HOA board—people you probably didn't vote for, operating with no training in civil liberties—can install surveillance equipment that feeds directly into police databases, and you won't find out until the cameras are already up. That's exactly what happened in Lakeway, Texas. Cameras had been operational for six months before residents learned they were being surveilled. No public meeting. No notice. No policy about how the data would be used or who could access it.

One city council member said, "We find ourselves with a surveillance system with no information and no policies, procedures, or protections." This isn't an anomaly—it's the business model. Sell to private entities, bypass public accountability, then connect everything to a centralized database accessible by law enforcement nationwide. Vigilant Solutions operates through a similar model but adds a twist: they partner with repossession companies. Repo agents drive around with license plate readers mounted on their vehicles, passively scanning every plate they pass while looking for cars to seize. That data doesn't just help them find vehicles—it gets added to Vigilant's national database, where it's sold to insurance companies, private investigators, and towing firms. Your location data isn't just a government surveillance problem—it's a commodity being traded by private industry. You're not the customer. You're the product.

How the System Works (And Why You Can't Escape It)

The technology itself is brutally efficient. Automated license plate readers are high-speed camera systems mounted on street poles, highway overpasses, mobile trailers, or police cruisers. They capture every license plate that enters their field of view—along with the date, time, GPS location, and a photograph of the vehicle. Sometimes the photo captures the driver and passengers. All of that gets uploaded to a central server. The speed is what makes this inescapable. ALPRs can scan up to 2,000 plates per minute. If you drive past one, you're in the database. There's no avoiding it, no opting out. You can't refuse to be photographed. The system is designed for total capture—it doesn't scan cars that look suspicious, it scans everything, then stores it all for later analysis. And "later" can mean a very long time. Flock Safety markets a 30-day retention period, but that's not standard across the industry. Most ALPR data is stored for months or years—sometimes five years or longer. Many jurisdictions have no retention limits at all, which means data on innocent people is kept indefinitely. In Los Angeles, 99.9% of the 320 million images stored in the ALPR database are of vehicles that were not flagged for any reason when the photo was taken. Translation: the overwhelming majority of this surveillance is not targeted at criminals. It's dragnet collection of everyone's movements, stored forever, just in case it's useful later. Police departments that contract with Flock can choose how broadly to share their data: with no other agencies, with specific named departments, with all departments in their state, or with the entire Flock network nationwide. Most choose the broadest sharing option.

So when your local police install a Flock camera, your location data doesn't stay local—it gets pooled into a national system where thousands of agencies can query it without a warrant. Vigilant's database works the same way, but they add commercial access. Over 2 billion detections growing at over 70 million per month, available not just to cops but to private companies. Insurance investigators, repo agents, bail bondsmen, private eyes—all searching the same database to find out where you've been. There is currently no federal regulation of ALPRs, and only sixteen states have enacted any rules at all. In most of the country, this is legal, unregulated, and expanding every day.

Who's Watching (And What They're Really Using It For)

The companies insist the technology is for solving crimes—finding stolen cars, tracking down suspects in serious cases. But mission creep isn't hypothetical. It's already happened. In 2017, the ACLU of Northern California found that more than 80 agencies in a dozen states were sharing license plate reader data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often in direct violation of state laws or sanctuary policies. Records obtained from Auburn, Massachusetts show ICE agents have direct access to query the Vigilant database. When Garrett Langley, Flock Safety's CEO, was asked by Vice whether his system could be used by immigration authorities for deportation, he said: "Yes, if it was legal in a state, we would not be in a position to stop them." Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, activists have raised alarms about license plate readers being used to track people traveling across state lines for abortion care. In states where abortion is criminalized, prosecutors and private bounty hunters could use ALPR data to identify vehicles that traveled from, say, Texas to a clinic in New Mexico—then use that evidence for civil or criminal penalties. The infrastructure is already in place. The data is already being collected. All that's needed is someone with access to the database and a reason to search it. Religious and political surveillance is documented. New York police used license plate readers to record everyone parked near a mosque. Birmingham police targeted a Muslim community while misleading the public about the scope of the project. Virginia state police tracked attendance at political events using ALPR data. This isn't speculative—these cases are confirmed, and they represent a tiny fraction of what's happening nationwide because most uses of ALPR data are never disclosed. Individual officers are exploiting the system for personal reasons.

An officer in Kechi, Kansas was arrested for using Flock's database to stalk his estranged wife. A Washington, D.C. officer pleaded guilty to extortion after looking up plates near a gay bar and blackmailing the vehicle owners. Police in Connecticut, Florida, and Kansas have been caught using the cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends. These are not isolated incidents—they're predictable outcomes when you give thousands of people warrantless access to location data with little oversight. And then there are the errors. In 2009, San Francisco police pulled over Denise Green, handcuffed her at gunpoint, and forced her to her knees because an ALPR misidentified her car as stolen. In August 2020, Colorado police pulled over Brittney Gilliam and handcuffed her, her daughter, and her nieces—forcing them all to lie face-down on the pavement—because the system flagged her SUV as a stolen vehicle. It wasn't. The actual stolen vehicle was a motorcycle with plates from a different state. These aren't edge cases. They're what happens when you deploy imperfect technology at massive scale with no accountability.

What This Data Reveals About Your Life

The real threat isn't a single photo of your license plate. It's the pattern. Taken individually, each scan is a data point. Taken together, they become what privacy researchers call a "pattern of life" profile—a detailed map of where you go, when you go there, how often, and who you see. Vendors openly advertise this capability. ALPR data can show whether a vehicle was at the scene of a crime, identify travel patterns, and reveal which vehicles are "associated with each other"—meaning if your car is frequently photographed near someone else's car, the system flags that relationship. Algorithms can infer who you're meeting with, which religious centers or health clinics you visit, which protests you attend, which political events you show up to. This is not paranoia. A large network of surveillance cameras makes it possible, in the words of privacy experts, "to tell where people are in the city, where they're going, who they're seeing such as which religious centers or health care clinics they're going to and when they're going to the places." The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court acknowledged this reality, noting that "with enough cameras in enough locations, the historic location data from an ALPR system in Massachusetts would invade a reasonable expectation of privacy." That threshold has already been crossed. We're not approaching the line—we're past it. And remember: 99.9% of the people in these databases are not suspected of any crime. You don't end up in an ALPR database because you did something wrong. You end up there because you drove past a camera. The system is designed to surveil everyone, then search the data later when it becomes useful. It's the digital equivalent of following every person in the country 24/7 on the off chance they eventually commit a crime. The chilling effect is real.

If you know your attendance at a protest, a mosque, a Planned Parenthood clinic, or a political rally is being automatically photographed and stored in a database accessible to thousands of agencies, you might decide not to go. That's not theoretical harm—that's First Amendment activity being suppressed by the existence of surveillance infrastructure. You don't need to be arrested or charged for the system to work. The threat of being watched is enough to change behavior. Over the past three years, Massachusetts police alone have spent over $2 million in taxpayer funds on this technology. Across the country, Flock's cameras are operational in over 2,000 cities in at least 42 states. Flock's stated goal is to expand to "every city in the United States." The grid is being built in real time. Your location data is already in it. And the companies running the system are explicitly designed to maximize data sharing, not minimize it.

The Legal Void (Or: Why No One Can Stop This)

You might be wondering: isn't this illegal? Doesn't the Fourth Amendment protect against unreasonable searches? Shouldn't the government need a warrant to track my location for months or years? The short answer is that courts have largely punted on this question, and Congress hasn't stepped in to fill the gap. At the federal level, there is no regulation of ALPRs. None. Only sixteen states have enacted any rules, and those rules are often weak. In Massachusetts, there is currently no statute regulating police use of ALPRs. No warrant requirement. No restrictions on how the data can be used, how long it can be kept, or who can access it. Courts have mostly relied on an old doctrine: if something is in "plain view," observing it doesn't count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. Since your license plate is visible to anyone on the street, photographing it doesn't require a warrant. That reasoning might make sense for a single photograph taken by a human officer. It makes no sense when applied to automated systems that scan 2,000 plates per minute and store the data for years in a searchable database accessible by thousands of users nationwide. But most courts haven't caught up. There have been warnings. Even in cases where courts upheld warrantless access to ALPR data, judges have cautioned that the technology could eventually violate the Fourth Amendment. One court noted that "that day might well be on the horizon" as the systems become more comprehensive. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went further, explicitly stating that comprehensive ALPR networks would "invade a reasonable expectation of privacy and would constitute a search for constitutional purposes." But warnings aren't the same as protections. The surveillance is already happening. The data is already being collected, stored, and shared.

By the time courts issue a definitive ruling that this violates the Constitution, millions of Americans will have years of location data sitting in corporate and government databases. And even if a court eventually rules the data collection unconstitutional, that doesn't mean the existing data gets deleted. It just means future collection might require a warrant—maybe. Meanwhile, the incentives are all pushing in the wrong direction. These are subscription-based business models—Flock and Vigilant make money every month from every camera. They're incentivized to expand, not restrain. Police departments are incentivized to adopt the technology because it's sold as a force multiplier: instead of needing officers to patrol and observe, you automate surveillance and query the database later. Politicians are incentivized to support it because opposing surveillance technology gets you labeled as soft on crime, even though there's no real evidence that ALPRs reduce crime rates. The result is a legal and regulatory void. The technology has outpaced the law, the companies are moving faster than legislatures, and by the time anyone figures out how to regulate this, the infrastructure will be so embedded that removing it will be politically and financially impossible. That's not an accident. That's the strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I find out if I'm in an ALPR database?

In most places, no. ALPR databases are not public, and private companies like Flock and Vigilant don't give individuals access to search for their own data. Some police departments will respond to public records requests, but the process is slow, expensive, and many agencies claim exemptions for law enforcement records. If you drive regularly in the U.S., assume you're in these databases—because you almost certainly are.

Is this legal?

Yes, in most jurisdictions. There's no federal law regulating ALPRs, and only sixteen states have any rules at all. Courts have generally held that photographing a license plate in public view doesn't require a warrant, even though the scale and permanence of automated tracking is radically different from a human officer making an observation. Some courts have suggested comprehensive ALPR networks might eventually violate the Fourth Amendment, but that hasn't stopped the rollout.

Do police need a warrant to track me using ALPR data?

In most places, no. Police can query ALPR databases without a warrant, without probable cause, and often without any suspicion of wrongdoing. The data is treated as something that was already lawfully collected (since your plate was in public view), so accessing it later doesn't require additional legal process. A few states have started requiring warrants or limiting retention periods, but those are exceptions.

Can I opt out or block my license plate from being scanned?

No. There is no opt-out. ALPR cameras photograph every vehicle that passes—they don't check a do-not-track list. Some people have tried using license plate covers or reflective sprays to obscure their plates, but those are illegal in most states and will get you pulled over. The system is designed for total capture. If you drive, you're in it.

Who can access this data?

It depends on the system and the contracts in place, but generally: any police department that subscribes to the network (often thousands of agencies), federal authorities including ICE, and in some cases private companies like repo firms and insurance investigators. Individual officers have been caught abusing access to stalk ex-partners, and there are few technical controls to prevent that. Some systems log queries, but those logs aren't routinely audited. If someone with access wants to look you up, they probably can.

How long is my data kept?

It varies. Flock Safety advertises a 30-day retention policy, but Vigilant and other vendors keep data for years—sometimes five years or more. Many jurisdictions have no retention limits at all, which means your location data could be stored indefinitely. Even if a local police department has a policy to delete data after a certain period, that doesn't mean data shared with other agencies or stored by the vendor gets deleted.

What can I do to protect myself?

Realistically, very little if you need to drive. You can reduce exposure by driving less, using alternative transportation when possible, or choosing routes that avoid known camera locations (though that's nearly impossible to map comprehensively). Politically, you can push for local regulations: demand that your city or state require warrants for ALPR queries, impose strict retention limits, ban sharing data with out-of-state or federal agencies, and require public transparency about where cameras are located. Some cities have rejected or removed ALPR systems after public pressure—it's not hopeless, but it requires organized opposition.

Conclusion

The automotive surveillance grid is not coming—it's already here. Nearly 90,000 cameras scanning a billion plates a month, feeding databases that store your movements for months or years, accessible to thousands of agencies and private companies with no warrant requirement and almost no oversight. This isn't a proposal or a pilot program. It's operational infrastructure, expanding every day, and most Americans have no idea it exists. The companies building it are worth billions. The politicians funding it get to look tough on crime. And you get tracked everywhere you go, with no way to opt out and no recourse when the data is abused. If you're in the U.S. and you drive, you're in these databases. Check if your city has contracted with Flock Safety or uses ALPRs—many post vendor contracts publicly, though you might need to file a records request. Ask your city council what the retention policy is, who has access, and whether data is being shared with federal agencies. Push for local ordinances requiring warrants, limiting retention, and banning data sharing. Some places have successfully fought this off, but only when people showed up and made noise. The alternative is letting a handful of private companies and unaccountable agencies build a permanent record of everywhere you've ever driven—and hoping they never decide to use it against you.\n\n**SurvivalBrain is designed for moments when centralized systems become threats instead of tools.** Offline AI with privacy-first architecture, no internet required, no data leaving your device. When the infrastructure around you is built for surveillance, you need technology you control. Learn more and join the waitlist at https://survivalbrain.ai/#waitlist—early access is $149 ($50 off the $199 launch price), available Q1 2026."