The roads have eyes, and MapQuest can now show you where they are. The navigational app added a feature this week that lets you discover where Flock cameras and other automatic license plate readers are in your neighborhood and beyond.
In a post on Bluesky, MapQuest said its app shows locations of license plate readers from Flock and many other companies — Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada and more.
To activate the feature, open the MapQuest app, tap the Layers icon and turn on the Surveillance option. You will then see tiny eyeballs on the map that indicate where license plate readers are located. If you click on an eyeball, it will show what type of license plate reader it is — dome or fixed, for example — and the exact coordinates.
MapQuest has been riding a wave of relevance, years after being relegated to lower-tier status by the likes of Google, Apple and Waze. In August, MapQuest refused to change Lake Ontario to Lake America in its maps despite President Donald Trump’s executive order. It then muscled into Android Auto to give drivers an alternative to Google Maps on their dashboards.
But MapQuest isn’t the first app to reveal locations of license plate readers. The others include DeFlock, FlockHopper, Pelican and LPR Maps. Some of them rely on crowdsourcing — drivers notify the app when they believe they have spotted a license plate reader and where it is.
Read more: How to Tell if a New Neighborhood Device Is a Flock Surveillance Camera
MapQuest didn’t say how it knows where license plate readers are located, and a representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although license plate readers have been around for decades and there are more than 140,000 all over the US, the technology has become highly unpopular. Flock cameras can collect a huge trove of data from a car: license plate, the make, model and color, and its location. Civil liberties groups and others say that all this information — input into law enforcement databases across the country — helps to create a mass surveillance network that can track everyone, not just suspected criminals.
There have been instances of Flock data being misused, such as police officers stalking ex-spouses and girlfriends, and people being wrongly pulled over and accused of stealing their cars.
License plate readers are also used for more mundane operations, such as electronic toll collection on roads and bridges, traffic violations, parking enforcement, vehicle repossessions and parking gate activation for access to restricted areas.
I’m surrounded by license plate readers
I tried the new MapQuest feature. Being more of a Google Maps person, I didn’t have the MapQuest app, so I installed it on my phone.
I opened the app, found the Surveillance layer and turned it on. I was greeted by a bunch of eyeballs on the map in my city and county. I clicked on several of them and saw their coordinates and what type they were — dome, fixed, pan/tilt and so on — but I didn’t see the names of the companies that own them.
But at least now I know which streets have eyes on me.
