Starting on June 11, soccer fans will be filling stadiums across North America to watch the FIFA World Cup. Those driving to matches in the United States might also find themselves being watched: WIRED identified 1,181 automatic license plate reader cameras, or ALPRs, within a five-mile radius of the 11 US stadiums playing host to the World Cup this summer. Most of those cameras are manufactured by Flock Safety.
ALPRs are set up along roadsides by municipalities, businesses, schools, and private groups such as homeowners associations to continuously log the license plate of each car that passes by them. A market survey report prepared for the US Department of Homeland Security says that some providers can collect other information like the make, model, and year of the vehicle and descriptions of bumper stickers affixed to it. Groups that operate networks of these cameras can then query those logs to find matches for specific plates, creating a dossier of where a vehicle has gone and when.
Flock Safety, in particular, allows operators to share their data with other groups on their network, meaning that depending on the operator, drivers can accidentally get caught up in a national dragnet. Flock Safety spokesperson Paris Lewbel acknowledged that the company works with government agencies and ‘other customers’ in areas around World Cup venues.
Lewbel emphasized that Flock’s customers, not Flock itself, 'own and control their data, decide if, when, and with whom to share it.' However, the history of abuse is clear: cops have been accused of using them to allegedly stalk exes and strangers. In 2025, US Customs and Border Protection were found to be violating a state law by accessing Flock data about drivers by Illinois’ secretary of state, who said it was ‘a clear violation of state law.’
Across the US, communities have started pushing back against ALPR deployment and fighting for more transparency. Activists have pried audit logs revealing whose license plates were searched and why, and assembled it into a searchable database.
