Yes, Your Phone Tracks You. That’s a Reason for Fewer Dragnets — Not One More.

Post about license-plate cameras anywhere and the reply arrives on schedule: “Your phone already tracks everything you do. That ship sailed years ago.”

It’s the most common thing we hear — more common than any defense of the cameras themselves. It deserves a real answer, because the people saying it aren’t wrong about phones. They’re wrong about what follows. One invasion of your privacy is not permission for the next one.

You have some control over the phone. You have none over the road.

Concede the point fully: phone tracking isn’t meaningfully voluntary either. The “consent” buried in a 40-page terms-of-service page is thin, turning off one app’s permission doesn’t stop every form of location inference, and most people can’t leave the phone at home — not with a job, kids, banking, and emergencies riding on it. That’s a real privacy problem, and a reason to demand stronger consumer-protection law. It is not a reason to let local government build a second tracking system with no settings menu at all.

Because the phone, for all its flaws, still offers degrees of control. You can toggle location services. You can deny permissions app by app. You can buy a phone built for privacy — a whole market competes for customers who care.

The camera bolted to the public right-of-way offers none of that. You can’t deny it permission. You can’t leave your plate at home — North Carolina law requires most vehicles on public roads to display one (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-63). For an ordinary driver, there is no practical, everyday opt-out from camera-covered public roads. Roads you paid for.

You have at least some control over the phone. You have none over the road.

One of our neighbors put it better than we have: why does everything my phone does come with an opt-out, while the government’s camera network comes with none?

One camera isn’t the problem. The searchable database is.

Here’s what the phone comparison misses about how these systems actually work. Automated license-plate readers don’t just check passing cars against a stolen-vehicle list and forget the rest. They record the time and place of ordinary vehicles — yours — and store those observations in a database that can be searched later.

The question was never whether an officer may see one plate on one road. Officers have always been able to do that. The question is whether government may automatically record everyone’s plates, keep the observations, combine them across jurisdictions, and search backward through the resulting movement history — before anyone is suspected of anything. In New Hanover County that isn’t abstract: the Sheriff’s Office network was searched roughly 2.98 million times in about 16 months, with the name of every searching agency and officer redacted.

A single camera seeing your car once reveals little. A dense, shared network that can place your car outside a therapist’s office, a place of worship, a union meeting, a protest, and a campaign office reveals something very different. Picture the nurse driving home from a night shift, the parent leaving a custody hearing, the survivor whose safety depends on staying unfindable. None of them are suspects. All of them leave a trail.

To be fair, supporters aren’t wrong about one thing: these systems have recovered stolen vehicles and generated leads. The debate isn’t whether a camera can ever solve a crime. It’s whether that justifies recording the movements of every innocent driver in the county, indefinitely and in advance.

A data broker is a consumer problem. The government is a constitutional one.

The phone comparison also blurs two different problems. Corporate data collection is a consumer-protection problem, and a serious one. Government tracking is a constitutional one.

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t mention Google. It was written to restrain the state — the institution that can arrest you, prosecute you, and take your children, your assets, and your liberty.

And the two are merging. Federal agencies have acknowledged buying location data from commercial brokers instead of seeking warrants. The courts have started to respond. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held that police generally need a warrant before acquiring an extensive history of a person’s movements from cell records. This June, in Chatrie (June 29, 2026), the Court held that obtaining a person’s Google location history is a Fourth Amendment search too — even though a private company stores the records — rejecting a crucial assumption: location information doesn’t lose constitutional protection just because a private company holds it.

What Chatrie held — and didn’t. The Court held that obtaining a person’s Google location history is a search. It did not strike down every geofence warrant — the remaining questions went back to the lower courts — and license-plate-reader databases weren’t before the Court at all. Whether courts extend the same reasoning to large ALPR networks is unsettled. But the question gets harder for the government, not easier, as cameras multiply, retention grows, and agencies gain the power to search movements across jurisdictions.

That’s the frame for what Flock Safety — the private vendor behind most of these municipal networks — is actually selling: a parallel, government-searchable location database at county scale, populated before any particular driver is suspected of anything, and billed to your county. Whether the Constitution permits that is exactly the question the courts haven’t answered. Your commissioners shouldn’t pretend it has been.

Adding a tracker because trackers already exist

Follow the fatalist argument to its end. Because your phone tracks you, the county adds plate cameras. Because plate cameras exist, the Sheriff adds social-media surveillance software. Because that exists, add Bluetooth and device tracking — hardware a Greensboro contractor is already selling into North Carolina. Each system becomes the excuse for the next.

“Everything already tracks you” isn’t an argument for one more tracker. It’s the strongest argument for drawing a line somewhere — and the government camera network, the one system you never consented to, can’t configure, and can’t leave, is exactly the right place to draw it.

The ship hasn’t sailed. Communities keep turning it around.

Fatalism has a factual problem, too: residents keep proving it wrong. As of late June 2026, advocacy and news organizations had counted more than 53 U.S. cities and counties that canceled, suspended, declined, or rejected Flock programs. Each one started with people who refused to accept that resistance was pointless:

• Hillsborough, Pittsboro & Chatham County, NC ended Flock by public votes — proof that in North Carolina, this is won at the podium.
• Columbus, OH ordered its police to stop statewide sharing after an audit found up to 15,577 immigration-purpose searches of residents’ data.
• Dayton, OH found more than 7,100 immigration-related searches against its own written policy — and paused its fixed-camera program.
• Los Angeles let its Flock contract expire in July 2026 over civil-liberties and data-sharing concerns — the nation’s third-largest police department walking away.

And when Ring announced a partnership that would have routed doorbell footage into Flock’s law-enforcement ecosystem, the backlash was immediate and the companies canceled it before it launched. Not one frame of customer footage ever flowed through it.

Your plan: four things to ask your commissioners

You manage your phone one toggle at a time. The camera network can only be managed by your county commissioners — and they answer to you. Ask them, on the record, for four specific things:

• Publish the full agency-access list and the audit logs. Who can search the records, and what must they document?
• Disable nationwide search while the policy is under review.
• Require a warrant or a documented case connection before any historical search of residents’ movements.
• Put any contract renewal on a public agenda — not a consent calendar. (The county’s contract can be canceled at any time.)

We wrote a model resolution so your board doesn’t have to start from scratch, and every figure above traces back to the numbers, sourced in one place.

Your phone is tonight’s problem. The cameras are Thursday’s.

The New Hanover County Board of Commissioners meets August 17, 2026. Public comment is three minutes — enough to say it plainly: one invasion of privacy is not permission for another, and the county has no business keeping a standing, warrantless record of where everyone drives. (How to speak — and what to say.) Bring the friend who keeps telling you the ship has sailed. It hasn’t — but it won’t turn itself around.

Sources

• DeFlockILM — Three Million Searches, Zero Names · Flock in New Hanover County, by the numbers · what Chatrie changed · the Ring–Flock backlash.
• Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018); Chatrie v. United States (U.S. June 29, 2026). N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-63 (plate display) and § 20-183.30–.33 (the ALPR statute).

DeFlockILM is a citizen effort on ALPR and privacy issues in the Wilmington area. This is general information, not legal advice, and creates no attorney-client relationship. Last updated July 14, 2026.