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 the ones 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.”
Andrew Elvish, the VP of global marketing for Genetec, which sells ALPR software, says the Canadian company is focused on helping organizations manage parking and isn’t interested in providing excessive access to aggregated license plate data, which he says is a practice that people should be rightfully concerned about.
ALPRs are powerful surveillance tools and ripe for abuse: 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.” Flock employees even have reportedly accessed cameras inside a children’s gymnastics room and other locations as part of a sales pitch, according to 404 Media. (In a blog post, Flock Safety said that the employees were not “spying on children” and were “well-intentioned employees who accessed a camera network with the city’s explicit permission, as part of their job.”)
Lewbel, the Flock spokesperson, says that the company is “aware of a very small number of incidents of abuse,” adding that Flock Safety does not have a relationship with DHS, including CBP, and that agencies outside of Illinois need to say that they’re complying with Illinois law before they can access Illinois data.
Tracey Ades, a senior director of marketing for Genetec, says the company does its best to make its tools as safe as possible, but at the end of the day it’s their customers’ tool to deploy. “So the need for legislation to limit what people can do?” says Ades. “That needs to be thought through.”
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. Dozens of cities have terminated contracts, and groups are planning a national week of action against ALPRs in August. WIRED relied on data compiled by one volunteer mapping project, DeFlock, to identify where ALPRs were located near US World Cup stadiums. Since the data is crowdsourced, it may not be a full picture of all the ALPRs in a given area.
