They know what you did last summer

And spring, and winter, and ...

“The government has a secret system that spies on you every hour of every day.”

That’s the opening line from Person of Interest - a TV show about mass surveillance, easily my most favourite one. Fiction right?

Except Israel scrapped 700 Chinese vehicles after discovering that the system was not so secret, it wasn’t their government and sure wasn’t fiction. $17 million worth of Chery SUVs, driven by military officers and their families, got dumped after cyber experts couldn’t lock down the security vulnerabilities. These weren’t stripped-down economy cars - they were Tiggo 8 Pros, fully loaded with 360-degree cameras, GPS, WiFi, 4G connectivity, and advanced driver assistance systems.

The Israeli military doesn’t waste $17 million on paranoia. They found their defense installations compromised. The cars were mobile tracking devices broadcasting movements, locations, and likely even imagery directly to Chinese servers. Every trip to a missile defense installation. Every classified command center. Every weapons depot. All mapped and recorded.

Western media ran the story as “China Bad”. And everyone nodded along while completely missing the point.

This isn’t a Chinese problem.

Every car manufacturer - American, European, Japanese, Korean - is building the exact same surveillance infrastructure. The only difference is which government or corporation gets the first crack at your data.

You already carry a surveillance device in your pocket. Your phone tracks your location, monitors your behavior, records your conversations, and sells your data to whoever pays. You probably made peace with that years ago, or at least stopped thinking about it.

Now you’re driving one too.

The Chery vehicles Israel dumped had identical capabilities to the GM, Ford, Toyota, or Tesla in your driveway. Same data collection. Same constant transmission. The vulnerability isn’t the nationality of the manufacturer. It’s the business model.

But there’s a difference. Your phone doesn’t have 360-degree cameras recording everyone around you. Your phone doesn’t transmit detailed behavioral metrics to insurance companies who use it to jack up your rates (yet). Your phone isn’t mandated by federal law to include a remote kill switch and “passive monitoring” systems accessible by “authorized third parties.”

Your car is a mobile data harvesting platform, and you bought it thinking it was transportation.

General Motors got caught in early 2024. The New York Times reported that GM had been collecting detailed driving data from millions of customers and selling it to insurance companies without meaningful consent. OnStar Smart Driver - marketed as a safety feature - was harvesting location data every three seconds, logging every instance of hard braking, late-night driving, speeding, and sudden acceleration.

GM made millions. Insurers used the gathered data to jack up premiums or deny coverage. Customers only found out when their rates inexplicably spiked despite clean driving records.

Kenn Dahl watched his Chevy Bolt insurance costs jump 21% despite never having an accident. He’d never opted into any monitoring program - or so he thought. Buried in the enrollment process for OnStar was consent that most customers either missed entirely or didn’t understand.

By the time the scandal broke, data from 8 million drivers had been shared with LexisNexis and Verisk Analytics, who packaged it into “driving scores” and sold access to insurance companies. GM pocketed upfront payments plus ongoing royalties.

The FTC sued in January 2025. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed criminal charges. Honda got hit with a $632,500 fine in California for similar practices - a rounding error for a company printing money from surveillance capitalism.

GM shut down the Smart Driver after they got caught. But they didn’t stop collecting the data. They just stopped selling it to insurers. For now. The collection infrastructure remains in place, humming along, recording everything.

Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, Ford, BMW - they all have similar programs. Some are more obvious about it than others. But the game is the same: harvest behavioral data, monetize it however possible, bury the consent in legalese.

Tesla doesn’t even need to sell your data to third parties. They cut out the middleman entirely with Tesla Insurance, using granular vehicle data - battery temperature, driver assist usage, individual trip details - to undercut competitors by 30% on some models. They’ve got data other insurers can’t access, which means they can price more accurately, which means more market share.

It’s brilliant. And terrifying.

The insurance telematics market hit $5 billion in 2024, projected to reach $19 billion by 2032. Progressive’s Snapshot program. State Farm’s Drive Safe. Allstate’s Drivewise. They’re all data collection schemes wrapped in discount offers.

You install the little OBD-II dongle or download the app, they monitor your every move, and maybe - maybe - you save 5% on premiums. Meanwhile they’re building comprehensive behavioral profiles worth far more than whatever discount they’re dangling.

The 2021 Infrastructure Bill even made it mandatory. Section 24220 requires all new vehicles to include “advanced impaired driving prevention technology” that “passively monitors” driver performance. The official line is it’s about drunk driving. The actual text mandates constant surveillance with a backdoor for “authorized” third parties.

Your car is required by federal law to spy on you. And the data gets monetized by corporations who are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value, not protect your privacy.

While automakers sell your data for profit, a $7.5 billion Atlanta startup called Flock Safety is building the infrastructure to track every vehicle in America.

Flock sells license plate readers to police departments, homeowners associations, shopping malls, schools, and private businesses. As of July 2025, they operate nearly 90,000 cameras across almost 7,000 networks in 49 states, scanning over 20 billion vehicles monthly.

The cameras don’t just read plates. They capture make, model, color, body type, bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, and visual “fingerprints” unique to each vehicle. All uploaded to a central database searchable by any agency Flock grants access.

And they grant access liberally.

EFF research analyzing 12 million searches between December 2024 and October 2025 found systematic abuse. A Texas police officer used it to hunt a woman who’d had a self-administered abortion. The system flagged Romani communities using racial slurs. Between June 2024 and October 2025, police performed hundreds of searches with terms like “roma traveler” and “possible g*psy” - often without mentioning any crime. Just racial profiling at algorithmic scale.

Over 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches targeting protesters at constitutionally protected gatherings. The “reason” filed for these searches? Usually just one word: “protest”.

Flock markets this as “transparency” - agencies log their search reasons, audit reports get generated, oversight happens. In reality, it’s a digital paper trail that documents civil rights violations but does nothing to prevent them.

The company recently announced Flock Nova, integrating their license plate data with commercial data brokers offering “people lookup” services. They’re automating the connection from license plate to identity to full dossier. In the 1970s, Congress banned government agencies from building exactly these kinds of files on people not suspected of crimes. Flock is helping police agencies do the same thing by outsourcing it to private contractors.

They’re also expanding into video surveillance with AI-powered natural language search. Coming soon: search for “landscaping trailer with ladder” or “blue sedan with roof rack” or, inevitably, “Black male with dreadlocks.”

And drones. Flock bought drone manufacturer Aerodome in October 2024 and is building a 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Atlanta. They’re marketing “Drone as First Responder” programs to police and “Drone as Automated Security” to private businesses.

Private corporate drones. Flying over neighborhoods. Feeding real-time video into Flock’s surveillance network. Integrated with their license plate readers, gunfire detectors, and soon their partnership with Amazon Ring cameras.

The CEO of Flock Safety claims their technology can “eliminate all crime in America.” What he means is they want a camera on every block, a drone over every neighborhood, and a search portal for every cop and corporate security guard in the country.

Funded by Peter Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz - the same Silicon Valley capital that built Palantir and half the surveillance infrastructure currently deployed against American citizens. Thiel famously wrote in 2009 that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.” Marc Andreessen praised early fascist theorists and promotes the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

These are the people building your city’s surveillance infrastructure. With your tax dollars. And selling access to whoever pays.

The UK government announced in November 2025 that electric vehicles will pay 3 pence per mile starting in 2028. Plug-in hybrids get charged 1.5 pence per mile. The official position is they won’t require GPS tracking - just annual mileage verification at MOT appointments.

Sure.

They’re building the technical infrastructure for comprehensive mile-by-mile tracking, they’re mandating mileage reporting, and they expect us to believe they’ll never flip the switch on real-time monitoring. The consultation documents already mention “opt-in” telematics programs. Voluntary today, mandatory tomorrow.

Every government facing declining fuel tax revenues is implementing the same solution. New Zealand rolled it out in 2024. US states are running pilot programs. The EU is developing other frameworks.

But the pattern is identical: promise privacy protections, build the tracking infrastructure, wait for political cover to activate full surveillance, expand mission creep until it’s tracking everything.

In the US, the 2021 Infrastructure Bill laid the groundwork by requiring “passive monitoring” of driver behavior for impairment detection. The measure is deliberately vague. “Impairment” could mean drunk driving. Could mean tired driving. Could mean distracted driving. Could mean any behavior some algorithm decides is suspicious.

Former Rep. Bob Barr called it a “mandatory backdoor kill switch” and warned that the system must be “open” to remote access by “authorized” third parties. The choice of whether you can drive rests with an algorithm over which you have neither knowledge nor control.

Who counts as an “authorized” third party? Law enforcement certainly. But also insurance companies? Medical providers? Lenders who want to repo your car? The legislation doesn’t specify. Neither does the NHTSA’s preliminary guidance.

What it does specify is constant monitoring. Always-on. Passively collecting data on your driving behavior, location, speed, route choices. All the data infrastructure necessary to implement comprehensive tracking is being mandated by law.

In November 2025, the Associated Press exposed what they called a “mass surveillance network” run by US Border Patrol. The program uses license plate readers and predictive algorithms to track millions of American drivers hundreds of miles from any border.

The system flags “suspicious” travel patterns based solely on route, timing, and frequency. Not probable cause. Not reasonable suspicion. Just algorithmic pattern matching.

Once flagged, Border Patrol notifies local law enforcement, who pull vehicles over for pretextual stops - minor speeding, failure to signal, tinted windows, dangling air fresheners. Then comes the aggressive questioning, the vehicle searches, the arrests.

Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo got flagged for driving a truck hauling furniture to families in Mexico. Local sheriffs pulled him over in Texas, searched his vehicle, found thousands in cash that customers had paid him directly, and arrested him for money laundering. No charges were filed. His employer spent $20,000 on legal fees to clear his name and recover the company’s impounded property.

“Nine times out of 10, this is what happens,” one sheriff deputy admitted in court testimony - meaning nine out of ten searches find nothing illegal. But the system keeps running because the goal isn’t crime prevention. It’s surveillance.

CBP calls it the “Conveyance Monitoring and Predictive Recognition System” (CMPRS). The system develops “patterns of life” for vehicles by aggregating license plate data from thousands of cameras nationwide. It integrates commercial plate readers from companies like Flock Safety into a federal surveillance network.

And it operates without warrants. Without oversight. Without transparency. Building comprehensive databases on millions of Americans based purely on where they drive.

The November revelation sparked outrage from civil liberties groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it “massive government overreach that puts every American under warrantless mass surveillance.”

Nothing changed. The program continues operating. More cameras get installed. The database grows.

The Metropolitan Police in London made 962 arrests between September 2024 and September 2025 using live facial recognition. South Wales Police claims six years without a false alert. UK authorities rolled out ten mobile facial recognition vans in August 2025, promising they’d only target wanted criminals.

In the US, facial recognition has led to at least eight documented wrongful arrests. All but one were Black people.

Robert Williams was the first. Detroit police arrested him in January 2020 for shoplifting watches from a Shinola store. Facial recognition had flagged him as the ninth-best match from security footage. The detective didn’t check his alibi, didn’t investigate whether he was in the area at the time, didn’t do any actual police work.

Williams spent 30 hours in jail before charges were dropped. He developed PTSD from the arrest. The incident happened in front of his two young daughters and wife, on his front lawn, in view of his neighbors. The detective later admitted in court that investigators “put this in in motion without even looking at other information.”

In 2024, Detroit settled Williams’ lawsuit and implemented some of the nation’s strongest restrictions on facial recognition use. But only for Detroit. And only because Williams fought back.

Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when Detroit police arrested her in February 2023 for carjacking based on facial recognition. She pleaded with officers to check whether their suspect was eight months pregnant. They refused. She spent 11 hours in custody.

The Washington Post investigation found that in all eight known wrongful arrests, police failed to take basic investigative steps. They treated algorithmic matches as probable cause rather than investigative leads.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re features of the system. Facial recognition provides a veneer of scientific certainty that short-circuits actual investigation. It’s faster to trust the algorithm than do police work. And when the algorithm is wrong - which happens disproportionately with Black faces - people go to jail.

Your vehicle’s cameras feed this system. The 360-degree surround cameras. The dash cams. The parking cameras. All capturing faces, license plates, and identifying characteristics without consent. Autonomous vehicles from Waymo and Cruise have been used by law enforcement for investigations, providing rolling surveillance platforms that record everything, everywhere, always.

Shopping mall cameras run by Flock Safety. Private business cameras shared with police. Ring doorbell footage integrated into department databases. Vehicle cameras. Fixed street cameras. It’s all feeding the same facial recognition systems with documented error rates and racial bias.

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Israel dumped 700 Chinese cars because they were surveillance platforms broadcasting to Beijing.

Check your driveway. You’re likely owning one too.

The difference isn’t that yours is safer. It’s that yours transmits to your insurance company instead. Or your manufacturer. Or Flock Safety. Or whoever bought access this week.

We traded comprehensive surveillance for lane departure warnings and parking assist. The people who designed that trade - funded by billionaires who explicitly stated they don’t believe in democracy - are building the infrastructure to make sure you can’t opt out.

You’re not driving transportation anymore. You’re operating a data harvesting platform that you’re contractually obligated to maintain, insure, and fuel.

All perfectly legal.

All paid for by you.