My neighbor Dottie knocked on my door Tuesday holding her phone out like she'd just caught something in a jar. "Did you know MapQuest is back?" she said. I told her MapQuest never left, it just got very quiet for about fifteen years while we all switched to Google Maps and stopped thinking about it.
Turns out Dottie had a reason to care. She'd read that MapQuest just added what they're calling a "surveillance layer" — animated little eyes on the map, marking where automated license plate readers are installed in your community. ALPRs. The cameras that log your plate, your location, and your timestamp whether you're going to church or going to a protest or just going to the grocery store. According to MapQuest's general manager Doug Berger, the data comes from public records, much of it surfaced by activists who spent real time filing requests to find out where these things are. "You would never know unless they were pointed out to you," he told CBC News. Which is sort of the whole point of surveillance, right? You're not supposed to know.
The biggest name in the ALPR business right now is a company called Flock Safety, whose network reportedly captures around 20 billion plate reads a month. Twenty billion. And lately Flock's been in the news not because it's catching bank robbers, but because officers have apparently used the system to track ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, and anybody who's had the misfortune of annoying the wrong cop. That's the context MapQuest is wading into.
Here's what I find genuinely interesting about all this. MapQuest also refused, a couple months back, to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" on its maps after certain political pressure trickled down. Google changed its maps before the executive order was even finalized. Apple followed fast. MapQuest, which has a fraction of either company's revenue, said no. And apparently picked up three million new users because of it.
I don't want to get too starry-eyed about a mapping company. MapQuest is owned by System1, an analytics outfit, so it's not exactly a scrappy nonprofit run by librarians. I'm pretty sure there's always a business angle somewhere in these decisions. But the practical effect — a map app that shows you where the cameras are, built from public records that citizens had to fight to get — is useful regardless of the motive.
Honestly, useful is underrated. I spent a decade watching tech companies pile features onto products nobody asked for, and here's a thirty-year-old mapping service doing something genuinely practical with information that was always technically public but nearly impossible to find.
My printed road atlas from 2003 is still accurate for the most part. It just doesn't show the cameras. Nothing did, until now.
Have you switched back to MapQuest, or found another way to keep track of where the surveillance infrastructure in your area actually is?
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