It builds a location history
One scan is a data point. Thousands of cameras, retained for months, become a map of where you sleep, worship, organize, protest, and seek medical care — assembled without a warrant.
Franklin County & Central Ohio
Who is watching every car in Columbus?
Automated license plate readers photograph every vehicle that passes them and log where you were, and when. DeFlock Columbus maps them, explains who runs them, and helps you do something about it.
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Cameras mapped locally
Live from OpenStreetMap
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Sold by Flock Safety
Of the cameras mapped here
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Warrants required
To scan and store your plate
The basics
What are ALPRs?
An automated license plate reader is an AI camera pointed at traffic. It photographs every passing vehicle, converts the plate to text, and writes a record: this plate, at this spot, at this minute.
Newer systems go further. They log the make, model and color of your car and note distinguishing features — a roof rack, a dent, a bumper sticker — so a vehicle can be tracked even when the plate is obscured. None of this requires you to be suspected of anything. The camera does not know who is a suspect. It records everyone.
A scan is not a search of a suspect. It is a search of everyone, kept on the chance that someone later turns out to be worth looking for.
The data rarely stays local. Most ALPR systems in the U.S. run on vendor-hosted networks where hundreds or thousands of other agencies can run searches. Your drive across Columbus can be queried from another state.
Why it matters
The problem with mass plate surveillance
It gets misused
Investigative reporting has repeatedly found officers running plate searches for personal reasons, and local agencies querying networks on behalf of outside authorities. Access controls exist on paper; audits keep finding they were not followed.
The evidence is thin
Vendors market these systems as crime-solving infrastructure, but independent evaluations have struggled to show durable reductions in crime. Communities are asked to accept permanent tracking on the strength of vendor case studies.
Misidentification carries real cost too. Plate readers misread characters and hit against stale records, and those errors have ended in drivers held at gunpoint during ordinary traffic stops. Automation does not remove human judgment from policing — it just moves it earlier, to the moment the alert fires.
The vendor
What is Flock?
Flock Safety is the largest ALPR vendor in the United States. It sells cameras and a subscription to police departments, sheriff's offices, universities, business districts and homeowner associations — including many across central Ohio. Captured vehicle data flows to Flock's cloud, where participating agencies can search it and share it with one another.
Flock is not the only vendor. Motorola Solutions, Vigilant, Rekor, Genetec and others sell comparable systems, and they raise the same questions. We use "ALPR" throughout this site because the concern is the technology and the network behind it, not one company's logo.
Many agencies publish a transparency page listing their camera count, retention period, and sharing partners. Those pages are a good place to start — and the gaps in them are worth asking about.
The local record
This is already a Columbus fight
Central Ohio police departments have put roughly 319 Flock cameras under contract for nearly $2 million, and that count only includes the departments that answered records requests. Then an audit of Columbus police network data found it had been searched for possible immigration-related reasons up to 15,577 times.
Council responded by scheduling a public hearing, the mayor ordered a halt to statewide data sharing, and the city's contract runs out at the end of 2026. Every one of those is a decision point, and every one is still open.
Public hearing: August 10, 2026 at City Hall (). Council takes public comment and questions Flock directly. What to say →
See what is mapped near you
Every camera on our map was reported by a person who noticed it. If you know one that is missing, add it — the map only sees what we see.