I didn’t care too much about being surveilled. One company changed my mind. There’s a kind of surveillance camera I can’t stop thinking about. Across the United States, they watch over city street corners, store parking lots, and suburban neighborhoods. They register every single license plate that passes by, compiling that data into a massive searchable police database. And — in just a few years — they’ve spread all over the country largely thanks to a single tech startup. Over the past month, I’ve been down a rabbit hole trying to understand how these automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, spread so quickly across the country — and what they mean for our right to privacy.