A Canadian YouTuber, Anthony Sistilli, built a homemade automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system to track police vehicles, sparking a visit from local officers who questioned his intentions. His experiment highlights a critical tension in surveillance debates: if tracking police raises privacy concerns, what safeguards protect ordinary motorists whose movements are extensively logged by similar technologies? Peel Regional Police themselves utilize ALPR on hundreds of patrol vehicles, retaining data for up to 30 days. This encounter comes as debates around ALPR usage intensify, with a recent US judge ruling warrantless historical ALPR searches unconstitutional, deeming the technology a form of “indiscriminate mass surveillance.” Sistilli’s project, though small-scale, aimed to challenge public perception of surveillance by mirroring the data collection practices police employ.