DUBLIN, Ohio — Somewhere between the Kroger and the other Kroger, Marla Vensetti realized the license plate camera map she had downloaded that morning was not, in fact, telling her where the cameras were. It was telling her where she had been.
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The map, released last week by a two-person digital rights outfit operating out of a rented desk above a vape shop, plots every automated license plate reader its volunteers have been able to physically confirm in 41 states. Users enter a starting point and a destination. The map returns a route, an estimated travel time, and a small pulsing dot labeled NEAREST DEVICE, which for 94 percent of tested addresses appears immediately behind the vehicle and stays there.
“People keep emailing to say the app is broken because the camera won’t move off their bumper,” said Devin Okafor, who wrote most of the code. “It’s not broken. That’s a real camera. It’s on the light pole you just went under. There’s another one at the Wendy’s. You’re doing great.”
Okafor said he built the tool expecting to help drivers avoid surveillance corridors and instead built what several users have described as a horror game with no combat mechanic. Testers in suburban Phoenix reported that the map logged their vehicle nine times over a 1.4-mile trip to return a library book. A man in Cobb County, Georgia, attempted to outrun his nearest device for sport and was informed by the app, politely, that he had generated four new reads and a partial from a camera mounted on a private car wash.
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‘A Safety Mesh’
Guardright Civic Solutions, which manufactures roughly a third of the readers plotted on the map, said in a statement that it does not track individuals, only vehicles, plate numbers, timestamps, locations, colors, decals, roof racks, bumper damage, and the direction a person was traveling on a Tuesday in March.
“We prefer the term safety mesh,” said Guardright senior director of community trust Alicia Brun, who described the map as a helpful visualization of coverage the company is proud of. “If the nearest device appears behind you, that means the mesh is working. If it appeared in front of you, we’d have a gap. I’d have to call somebody about a gap.”
Brun added that any driver may opt out by mailing a notarized request to a processing center in Nevada, the parking lot of which is monitored by four Guardright readers.
The company’s growth has been driven less by police departments than by homeowners associations, which now account for the fastest-expanding category of buyers. The Willow Crest board in suburban Charlotte installed six readers at a cost of $71,000, positioned not at the entrance but around the pool, after a resident’s guest was observed swimming without a wristband.
“We’re not surveilling anyone,” said board treasurer Doug Lammert, 58, who keeps the license plate camera map open on a tablet during meetings and refers to it as “the situation.” “We’re documenting. There’s a difference, and it’s spelled out in the covenants.”
Lammert said the readers have so far generated 2,900 vehicle records and one enforcement action, against his own son-in-law.
Nobody Wanted The Answer
The map’s launch has been complicated by users who assumed the point was reassurance. Okafor said he has fielded requests for a filter that hides devices within one mile, a night mode that dims the dots, and, from at least a dozen people, a version that simply lies.
“A woman asked if I could add a feature where the camera is far away,” he said. “Not remove the camera. Just move the dot. She said she understood it wouldn’t be accurate. She said accuracy wasn’t what she was after.”
Vensetti, 44, said she now takes a route to work that adds eleven minutes and passes an additional three readers, because it goes by a llama farm.
“I’m not hiding from anything. I have a Honda Pilot and a Bath and Body Works rewards account,” she said. “But there’s something about knowing the exact pole. Before, it was ambient. Now it has a location and a serial number and a little dot that follows me to my mother’s house.”
Okafor said he has stopped using his own map. He said he made it three days before deleting it from his phone, and that the last thing he checked was the drive from his apartment to the vape shop office, a distance of six blocks.
“Fourteen reads,” he said. “I walked the next day. Camera got me anyway. Different camera.”