Each reader’s license plate mapped the herd near U.S. World Cup stadiums

Starting in June On November 11, soccer fans will fill stadiums across North America to watch the game Football World Cup. Those who drive to games in the US may also find themselves under surveillance: WIRED has identified 1,181 automatic license plate reading cameras, or ALPRs, within a five-mile radius of the 11 US stadiums hosting the World Cup this summer. Most of these cameras are manufactured by Herd safety.

ALPRs are set up along roadsides by municipalities, businesses, schools and private groups such as homeowners’ associations to continuously record the license plate of every vehicle they pass. A Market survey report The US Department of Homeland Security says some providers can collect other information such as the make, model and year of the vehicle and descriptions of the bumper stickers affixed to it. The groups operating the networks of these cameras can query those records to find matches to specific license plates, creating a file on where the car went 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 could accidentally fall into a national tow network.

Flock Safety spokesman Paris Lebel acknowledged that the company works with government agencies and “other clients” in areas surrounding World Cup stadiums. Leibel stressed that Flock customers, not Flock itself, “own and control their data, deciding if, when, and with whom to share it.”

Andrew Elvish, vice president of global marketing for Genetec, which sells ALPR software, says the Canadian company is focused on helping organizations manage parking and is not interested in providing excessive access to aggregate license plate data, which he says is a practice people should rightly be concerned about.

ALPRs are powerful surveillance tools ripe for abuse: cops have been accused of using them for alleged purposes leg Exes and strangers. In 2025, US Customs and Border Protection was found to be violating state law by accessing Fluke data about drivers by the Illinois Secretary of State, who He said It was a “clear violation of state law.” Even herd staff have responded Access to it Cameras inside the kids’ gymnastics room and other locations are part of the sales, according to 404 Media. (in a Blog post(Flock Safety said the employees were not “spying on children” and were “bona fide employees who accessed the camera network with the express permission of the city, as part of their job.”)

Lewbel, the Flock spokesman, says the company is “aware of a very small number of misuse incidents,” adding that Flock Safety has no relationship with DHS, including CBP, and that agencies outside of Illinois need to say they comply with Illinois law before they can access Illinois data.

Tracy Addis, a senior marketing manager at Genetec, says the company does its best to make its tools as safe as possible, but ultimately, it’s its customers’ tool to deploy. “So is there a need for legislation to restrict what people can do?” Addis says. “This needs to be thought through.”

Across the United States, communities have begun to resist the rollout of ALPR and fight for more transparency. Activists pulled out audit logs revealing which license plates were searched and why, and compiled them into a file Searchable database. Dozens of cities have it It has been terminated Contracts and groups plan a National Action Week Against ALPRs in August. WIRED relied on data collected by a volunteer mapping project, DeFlock, to locate ALPRs near World Cup stadiums in the United States. Since the data is crowdsourced, it may not be a complete picture of all ALPRs in a given area.