You probably know where the coffee shops and gas stations are in your neighborhood. But the cameras logging your license plate as you drive past? Those can be a little harder to keep track of.
Proton, the Swiss privacy company behind Proton Mail and Proton VPN, is helping make them easier to find by hosting a free map of Flock surveillance devices on its servers (you can explore the map on Proton's website). Flock tried to get the researcher behind the original project to take it down, according to The Intercept.
If you need a refresher on Flock, the company makes automated license plate readers used by police departments, businesses, schools, and homeowners associations. The cameras photograph passing vehicles whether or not their drivers are suspected of anything. Flock devices can record license plates, times, and locations, plus identifying details such as a vehicle’s make, model, color, and bumper stickers. According to Flock, its cameras log more than 20 billion vehicle sightings each month across 49 states.
Those records then go into Flock's cloud, where police can search them and share them with other agencies across city and state lines. You don’t have to be pulled over for your car to become part of a searchable record of where you’ve been — and that access has been abused. A Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers accused or charged with misusing license plate readers, often to track people in their personal lives. (Flock's system was involved in 46 of those cases.)
On Proton's map, you can enter your ZIP code to see devices in your area, or zoom and pan around the country. Note that the data is a snapshot from December 2025, though. Cameras installed or removed since then won’t be reflected.
"You have a right to know who's recording you when you leave home"
This isn't the first effort to put surveillance cameras on the map (literally). As Mashable previously reported, DeFlock Maps lets people look up license plate readers in their neighborhoods, including devices from Flock, Motorola Solutions, and other manufacturers. Volunteers report cameras they spot and add their locations to OpenStreetMap, the open-source mapping project.
MapQuest also added a "Surveillance Layer" to its app this month, letting users see known license plate reader locations, including Flock cameras. Turn it on under Map Options, and camera markers appear alongside the roads you’re traveling.
The difference here from other crowdsourced projects is that the locations come from Flock's own systems, according to the map's creator.
Security researcher Joshua Michael discovered in November 2025 that Flock's servers were exposing an access token anyone could obtain without logging in. He used it to retrieve an inventory of device locations, reported the issue to Flock, and published his findings and a map in December. That inventory included more than 170,000 cameras and over 130,000 other Flock devices.
Proton has questioned Flock's leadership directly about how its technology is used. In an interview published in August, CEO Garrett Langley said, "Any level of abuse greater than zero is unacceptable and makes me sick," pointing to audit logs and an optional tool designed to detect potentially abusive activity. But he declined to say how many police department contracts Flock had suspended or terminated over abuse. "I don’t think you should hold the entire city accountable for just the bad decisions of a few," he said.
When it came to Michael's research, Flock's response included legal threats, The Intercept reported. The company fixed the exposed-token flaw, while also publicly maintaining that it had never been hacked and that no Flock information had leaked. On his website, Michael says Flock also sent him a cease-and-desist letter (which he published) threatening litigation and told customers it had notified law enforcement, describing him as a "malicious actor."
Michael says that customer email acknowledged Flock had found no indication of unauthorized access when it closed the issue in December. He argues that this illustrates the very concern behind his research: that information could be taken without the company detecting it.
"I’m not backing down," he recently wrote on Instagram.
In September, brand-protection company Doppel also filed a trademark complaint on Flock's behalf. It argued that Michael's website could confuse customers or harm the company, even citing the disclaimer saying it wasn't affiliated with or endorsed by Flock — though Flock had not disputed the map's accuracy, as CyberNews reported.
Proton rejected the trademark argument and published a copy of the map on its Swiss servers in order to keep it available.
"This is an attempt to suppress information, not to prevent consumer confusion," Proton head of legal Marc Løebekken said.
For residents, that means another way to find out what's watching their streets — and a starting point for questions to local officials. As Proton puts it on the map's website: "You have a right to know who's recording you when you leave home."
Want more tech and digital culture news delivered to your inbox daily or sent straight to your device? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter or get Mashable push alerts today.