A new feature to find analyze long-term tracking trends has been rolled out. You can now not only see if you have been tracked, but also for how long.
Surveillance Details
After entering your plate, a new “Surveillance Details” link will appear that will show you for how long police have been tracking you.
This will bring you to the surveillance overview page that provides an overview of surveillance activity over time.
Follow this link for an example.
The data in the surveillance details overview gives you information on:
- How many repeated searches have occurred for a single license plate.
- The geographic extent of the searches (networks, devices).
- The period over which a license plate was surveilled.
- The period over which searches occurred.
- The time interval between searches.
Some of the longer-term surveillance incidents are now available on the statistics pages.
To determine if something qualifies as prolonged surveillance rather than individual searches, we look for targets that an operator searched on at least 5 different days within any 21-day period.
This frequency-based approach focuses on repeated, sustained attention to a target rather than relying on search timeframes which can be unreliable. Police often attempt to get the maximum available location history (e.g. from January 2022 through December 2025), as in this example, which makes the stated timeframe an unreliable indicator of actual surveillance duration.
Additionally, we require:
- At least 3 total searches of the same target
- Activity spanning more than 7 days overall
Because multi-year searches are nationwide, they return results based on the (unknown) retention period for each participating agency. The 1000+ day search likely got some results associated with organizations with long retention periods, but probably exceeded the retention period for many others — there is no way to tell what the actual duration of the surveillance is.
As always, we strongly encourage you to verify the presented results through the raw audit logs.
If you have trouble verifying a result on this site, or the results presented are incorrect, reach out and let us know.
Search identifiers
Although the license plates contained in public records should not pose an immediate privacy risk, we recognize the discomfort that may be experienced by publication of those data and continue to seek a balance between accountability and privacy.
Because of that, the surveillance overview shows “identifiers” rather than license plates. These identifiers are a coded representation of license plates. They can also be used in the main plate search on the homepage.
With some computer skills, it’s possible to resolve identifiers back to the original license plates — it is not more or less complex than finding the relevant entries in the already-published log files.