License-plate readers watch nearly every American road. CivilGPS puts all 102,837 mapped cameras on your screen — and in your windshield with AR — then routes you past fewer of them.
Hold up your iPhone and every mapped plate reader nearby is drawn over the live street — which pole it's on, which way it faces, and whether you're inside its sightline right now.
Every trip gets up to three routes, ranked by the plate readers they pass. You make the trade — a couple of minutes for a quieter drive.
Spot a new reader? Photograph the pole, aim the beam, done — it joins the open public record everyone sees. Police, crash, and hazard reports ride along, Waze-style and ephemeral.
We graded 300 U.S. cities on how heavily they're surveilled per resident — with the camera count, the share tagged Flock Safety, and how fast it all appeared. Most of it is brand new.
See every city's report card →We don't help you hide.
We help you see.
Automated license-plate readers photograph tens of millions of plates a day on public roads — yours among them — and most people have never been told where a single one stands. The cameras can look at us; we can look back. CivilGPS is built on the open, community-maintained public record of surveillance infrastructure: the same transparency the watchers expect of you. No accounts. No tracking. No location trail. An app about being watched should never watch you.
We collect as little as possible. What we do collect is encrypted in transit and at rest, access-controlled, and used for exactly one purpose: running CivilGPS. No selling, no profiling, no sharing — except where the law compels it. The platform that watches the watchers will never watch you.
A sprawling, largely unaccountable web of automatic cameras photographs ordinary people on public roads — usually with no notice and no consent. CivilGPS answers it by doing the one thing the operators won't: telling you the cameras are there. Transparency is the check on abuse.
CivilGPS shows public information about publicly-disclosed surveillance. It is not a tool for evading police or committing crimes, and using it that way is forbidden. Knowing where a camera is, is lawful. What you do with that knowledge is on you.
CivilGPS is a civic-transparency and public-awareness tool. The camera locations it shows come from public, open data (OpenStreetMap, via the DeFlock community, licensed ODbL) describing surveillance infrastructure that is visible from public roads. Nothing in CivilGPS is, or should be construed as, legal advice.
You agree to use CivilGPS only for lawful purposes. It must not be used to facilitate, plan, commit, or conceal any crime, to evade a lawful police stop, or to interfere with law enforcement. Being aware of a camera's location is not, by itself, unlawful — but what you choose to do with that awareness is your sole responsibility. We do not support, condone, or assist criminal activity of any kind, and we will not knowingly help anyone do so.
No warranty. Camera data and community reports may be incomplete, outdated, or wrong; reports and pins are community-submitted and unverified. CivilGPS is provided "as is," for informational purposes only, with no guarantees — never rely on it as proof that a camera is, or isn't, present. CivilGPS is independent and not affiliated with any surveillance vendor or government agency.
Yes. Every camera location is public, open data — visible from the street, mapped by volunteers on OpenStreetMap (ODbL), the same way a speed-limit sign is public knowledge. Choosing which public road to drive on has always been your call. CivilGPS shows you information; what it never does is help anyone break the law.
No. No accounts, no analytics SDKs, no advertising IDs, no server logging your location as you drive. Your position is processed on your phone. The only data that ever leaves the device is what you deliberately submit — a camera or road report — tied to a random weekly-rotating tag, never your identity. Read the privacy policy; it's short and in plain English.
The open public record: OpenStreetMap's community-mapped surveillance layer (made searchable by the DeFlock project), under ODbL — 102,837 cameras and counting. When you map a camera with CivilGPS, you strengthen that record for everyone.
Preferring not to be photographed isn't probable cause; it's privacy — the default humans enjoyed for all of history until about fifteen years ago. CivilGPS treats it as what it is: a routing preference.
iPhone first, via TestFlight, soon. Join the waitlist — one email when it's live, nothing else.
Be first in line when CivilGPS reaches TestFlight — or open the map and start exploring right now.