🚨 Your license plate is a search result

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🤯 WOW! Flock’s cameras scan more than 20 billion license plates a month across 5,000-plus American communities. Your grocery runs are in there. And the CEO who built the network? He reportedly keeps his own plates out of the lookup tools.

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

Flock started in 2017 with one idea: Cameras read license plates and call the police when a stolen car rolls by. Nine years later, it’s a $7.5 billion company with 120,000-plus cameras, and your commute is a search result.

Let me be fair, because this part is real.

The system finds bad guys. Colorado police cleared two AMBER Alerts and a homicide in one week using Flock hits. The company says it’s helped reunite more than 1,000 missing people with their families, and it works with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Ask a detective working a kidnapping, they’ll tell you: Find the car, find the kid. Cops didn’t build this network. They used the tool they were handed, and plenty used it to bring people home.

Then came the tool’s year from you-know-where.

In June, a Roanoke, Va., woman left for the park and came home to a Flock Raven listening device planted in her yard. No warning. After backlash over other devices showing up in unauthorized places, the city removed them all.

The Washington Post found 46 cases of officers using plate cameras to track exes and romantic partners. That’s not police work. It’s personal business on a government network, and good cops hate the abuse, too.

404 Media revealed a pitch to put Flock scanners on 350,000 Uber, Lyft and delivery cars. (Never launched, Flock swears.)

A defense contractor called Leonardo, the same company that already sells license plate readers to police, is shopping new tech called SignalTrace. Everything you carry is constantly broadcasting tiny wireless signals. Your phone. Your smartwatch. Your wireless earbuds. SignalTrace sits right next to a plate camera and sniffs those signals as you drive by. Then it pairs them with your plate. Same gadgets, same plate, a few times in a row?

Congratulations, that's your electronic fingerprint. Now the camera doesn't only know where your car went. It knows it's you inside it.

So can Flock survive? More than 30 cities have canceled, and the LAPD won’t renew. Investors handed Flock $950 million. Every canceled city is that cash driving away.

Flock recently put up some guardrails: a case number required for every search, automatic audits and a recommendation to keep data seven days instead of 30. Denver kept its cameras but banned immigration lookups.

That’s the real fight. Not cameras vs. cops. Cameras with rules vs. cameras without them.

Want to see your neighborhood? DeFlock.org is a free, open-source map of every plate reader from Flock and others that volunteers have spotted. More than 336,000 pinned and counting.

Want to drive around them? A free app with in-app purchases called FlockHopper plots two routes: the fastest one and the one that dodges every mapped camera. Grab it at dontgetflocked.com or search FlockHopper in your app store. One caveat: It only knows the cameras volunteers reported.

Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley reportedly blocks his plates and varies his routes. The guy who named the company apparently prefers to fly solo.

Speaking of… Fall is the most beautiful time in Florida. All the license plates start changing colors.

🎯 Send this to someone who waves at every camera like it’s a toll booth. It’s counting, not waving back.

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🔥 Hot wheels, literally: Imagine standing in your driveway deciding whether to risk your car burning the house down or getting stolen outside. That’s the choice for the unlucky owners who bought a park-outside recall car (paywall link). This year, we’ve had 17 campaigns for about 1.7 million vehicles, including an urgent warning for 1 million Jeeps. Electronics can stay hot after shutdown, sparking fires when no one’s around. Is your ride on the list? Pop your VIN or plate into NHTSA's free recall checker and find out in 30 seconds.

🚜 Yabba dabba dozer: Former Waymo engineers launched Bedrock Robotics to retrofit excavators and bulldozers (paywall link) with self-driving sensors and AI, so they can dig trenches and move earth without anyone in the cab. That could fix the labor shortage slowing down major building projects, but it also puts skilled operators in the crosshairs. Somewhere, Fred Flintstone lost his job at the quarry.

🍃 Natural GLP-1 support: If you’re looking for support without the needles or a prescription, you’re not alone. I take ImproveLife GLP-1 Support every day because it helps my body’s natural GLP-1 response, so I feel satisfied longer and make healthier food choices.** It’s stimulant-free, made in the USA with premium, clinically studied ingredients and simple enough to stick with. Get up to 50% off, plus free shipping today.

Prose and cons: One minute, your debut novel is worth millions. Next, your agent is examining every sentence like it came home after curfew. One author’s agents abandoned his book because they couldn’t confirm he wrote it without AI (paywall link). Publishers want hits, agents want certainty and authors are learning that suspicion alone can become a career-ending coauthor.

🧔 Silver faux: You’ve probably seen one of those videos of a silver-haired gentleman at a podcast microphone, explaining why women deserve better. Remove the gentleman, the podcast and any lived experience whatsoever. Facebook pages are manufacturing these AI heartthrobs for mostly women, then harvesting clicks and selling ebooks or subscriptions. I’m talking 126,000 to a million views per video. At least he’ll never ghost you. He already is one.

Your phone can answer critical medical questions for first responders. Even while it’s locked. Plus, a fire captain rescues his daughter from a crash after getting an iPhone SOS alert. We talk with Jake about the scary moment and how to make sure your phone is set up.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Chatbots this, subscriptions that. If it all feels like a lot, try google.com/ai. I use Google’s AI Mode for quick questions, from air fryer times to fixing something broken or finding where to buy a new one. Talk normally, ask follow-ups and it answers instantly with links. Best part? It’s free. More tips in my Splash of AI newsletter every Thursday.

🍎 Stop what you’re doing and update your iPhone. Apple just pushed iOS 26.6.1 (plus Mac, iPad and Vision Pro updates) fixing nearly 30 security holes, including a batch in the browser engine every app uses. This isn’t a “new emoji” update, it’s a “lock the doors” update. Tap Settings > General > Software Update and let it run while you sleep. Thirty holes patched, zero effort required. That’s my kind of home improvement.

📱 Face down, still in the loop: Ever put your phone on silent and miss the one alert you actually needed? Make the camera flash blink when notifications come in. On iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Flash for Alerts. On most Androids, try Settings > Notifications > Flash notification. Bonus: You can make the screen flash, too.

🥫 Dinner shouldn’t be a grip test: Twisting cans can be a pain, especially if you have arthritis or weaker hands. I found this electric opener for $20. Put it on the can, press the button and it cuts around the top, hands-free. You’ll never want to open one manually again.

👀 Handing YouTube over to the kids? Before they start clicking around, turn on Restricted Mode. It filters mature videos and hides comments. Click your profile icon > Restricted Mode and switch it on. Then open that same menu again and choose Lock Restricted Mode on this browser. That way, little fingers can’t undo it later.

🖥️ No more reaching behind the monitor: Changing brightness shouldn’t mean feeling around for tiny buttons. Twinkle Tray is a free Windows app that puts the controls right in your system tray. Using more than one monitor? Adjust each separately. You can schedule brightness by time of day, so your screens automatically dim at night. OK, what computer monitor sings best? A Dell. 😏

Photon Matrix, a crowdfunded laser bug killer entering mass production, uses lidar, radar and AI to identify tiny flying targets before zapping them within a 20-foot, 90-degree scanning zone. The company says safety systems protect humans, pets and birds, which feels like an important detail when your bug zapper has graduated to directed energy.

Prices start at $988.

It’s absurdly expensive mosquito control, but so is spending the entire summer donating blood against your will.

Watch it zap away. How did the police station handle its mosquito problem? They deployed the swat team. Ouch.

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🎓 What you learned today: Flock’s plate reader network can help find missing kids and still raise serious privacy questions, some recalled cars are “park outside” fire risks, self-driving construction equipment is coming for dirt work, AI suspicion is making authors prove they wrote their own books, and a laser mosquito zapper is headed to market because bug season apparently needed targeting systems. Not bad for one email. The future of work has a plot twist: Gamers, welders and electricians are quietly crushing it. Tomorrow, I’ll break down the jobs, the pay and how to get started.

🏁 The answer: C) A sensor that amplifies the motor’s vibrations. Yep, a precision accelerometer picks up electromechanical vibrations from the spinning motor, then equalizes and amplifies them through the speakers. No fakery, no AI karaoke. It’s just the car using some tech to sing its song. 

The system activates only during hard acceleration and braking in Performance mode. Cruise to the grocery store? Silent as a library.

Speaking of Ferraris with sound effects: A snail bought a Ferrari and had a big “S” painted on the doors. When he zooms by, everyone yells, “Look at that S-car go!” 🐌

📍 Scrolled past this one? Four Tile Bluetooth trackers are on sale for $60.* They work with iOS and Android, ring your phone on silent and tap into millions of users to help find lost items.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Life360, MONOZEL, Photon Matrix

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