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About
Who built this
Craig Smith, CLI
I built this site to make the surveillance around everyday life easier to see: the plate readers on the roads you drive, what they record, and what no public map can show.
The surveillance
Everyday driving now leaves a record most people never see. Fixed automated license-plate readers photograph passing cars and log the plate, time and place. Newer systems also note make, body type, color and details like roof racks or stickers. One read is a data point. Stored and searched over time, it becomes a history of where a car has been.
Volunteers have mapped 144,253 fixed ALPRs in OpenStreetMap across the U.S., and about 80% are tagged as Flock Safety. Mobile readers on police cars and repo trucks are not on those maps, so the real number along any route is likely higher. Retention rules vary by state. In Colorado, government “passive surveillance” images can be kept for up to three years.
Plate-reader logs are only one dataset. Data brokers sell address, phone and vehicle information openly. GPS trackers and AirTags can follow a car or a person without any public map at all. A nearby camera does not mean it captured you, or that anyone searched your plate — but the systems that can do that are real, and they are easy to miss.
Why this site exists
I built Am I Under Surveillance? so that picture is harder to ignore. The route checker is free. It stores nothing you search. It cannot tell whether you are being tracked — only the operator can — but it does put the publicly mapped cameras in view, with the limits stated plainly.
People should be able to see the surveillance infrastructure that touches ordinary life, understand what it collects, and know what it cannot answer. On this site that means the map, the city pages, the guides on Flock cameras, being followed, GPS trackers and hidden cameras, and the Protect yourself page on shrinking the rest of a data trail — including broker removals and public-records requests for local ALPR policies.
I also talk publicly about GPS and AirTag tracking, because those are the questions people bring when the map is not enough.
Craig Smith, CLI
Site contact: hello@amiundersurveillance.com. Estimates only. Not legal advice.