You drive to church on Sunday. A clinic on Tuesday. A late-night pharmacy on Thursday.
You probably did not consent to turning those trips into a searchable record. Yet a small camera near an intersection may have captured your license plate, vehicle details, location, and time. Multiply that by cameras across a city, then connect the searches across jurisdictions, and an ordinary drive stops looking ordinary. It becomes a trail.
This is why automated license plate readers, especially the network operated by Flock Safety, have become one of the sharpest privacy fights in American technology. The cameras can help police find stolen vehicles and missing people. They can also make it cheap and easy to reconstruct where innocent people have been.
The uncomfortable part is that both things can be true.
A traffic camera that works like a search engine
