Where the cameras are

Every device here is one somebody documented in a public dataset: plate readers, cameras, gunshot detectors. It is not complete, and that it is the largest public accounting in existence is the problem it was built to show.

96% of the world's documented plate readers are in the United States

Other countries have cameras. America has vehicle tracking. Of 115,324 plate readers documented worldwide, 110,789 are American and 4,535 are everywhere else combined.

Pan and zoom to see your own county. The panel on the left recalculates for whatever is on screen.

What you are looking at
Single device
Plate reader
Camera
Gunshot detector
Drone dock
Type not recorded
Live feed you can watch
Groups
Under 25 devices
25 to 150
150 to 600
Over 600
Click a group to zoom in. Click a single device for what is known about it.
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By manufacturer

One company accounts for most named devices in the public record. Nobody voted for that.

Plate readers by country

Every country with documented plate readers, ranked. The scale is logarithmic - a linear axis would render every country except one as a flat line.

When devices entered the public record

Read this carefully. These dates record when a device was first documented by a member of the public, not when it was installed. A spike means people started looking, not that cameras appeared. The gap between the two is the accountability problem in one chart.