MapQuest App Shows You Where License Plate Readers Are In Your Area
Source: CNet, Alex Valdes
Photo: A Flock Safety automated license plate reader camera and its solar panel on a pole in downtown Los Angeles in August 2026. (halbergman/Getty Images)
Turn on the Surveillance option and you’ll see tiny eyeballs on the map marking the cameras’ locations.
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.
Displaying surveillance camera locations was among the top three requests among MapQuest users, general manager Doug Bergen told CNET.
“In the last month, we’ve been inundated with direct requests from our users,” Bergen said. “They want to know where cameras are and what kind they are. Adding that information gives them a clearer picture of the road ahead and more choice in what their map shows.”
Bergen said that camera location data comes from OpenStreetMap, a global map of the world built by volunteers.
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: its license plate, 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 girlfri
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/mapquest-locations-of-license-plate-readers