Defeat the ALPR camera in your neighborhood.

Before you can defeat anything, you need to know where it is. ALPR cameras are usually wedge-shaped enclosures on tall poles at intersections, often paired with a solar panel. Look for the tell-tale dual-lens housing: one wide-angle, one telephoto, with a small NIR illuminator strip below.

Public records requests work. Most cities are required to disclose vendor contracts and camera locations under state public-records law. Search your city council's agenda for "automatic license plate" or "ALPR" — purchasing approvals are usually voted on in open session.

Tools we use: EFF Atlas of Surveillance map · DeFlock community map · your local council's meeting records portal · Google Street View (cameras stay up for years).

ALPR systems get tripped up by surprisingly simple things: glare from a flash, a non-standard plate angle, a fingerprint on the lens, weathering on the plate itself. The UNS-PC1 plate sleeve is an optical-grade clear cover with a calibrated anti-glare layer that reduces ALPR read accuracy in our internal testing without obstructing human readability.

Read the law before you mount one. State plate-cover laws are inconsistent. Some states ban any covering. Others ban only tinted/colored covers. We've put a starter table below — but verify with your DMV before installing.

The cheapest legal countermeasure is also the most boring: keep your plate clean and centered. A consistent 5–10° rake, a fresh coat of road grime, or a plate frame that overlaps the top characters can be enough to drop you below confidence threshold.

The single most effective ALPR countermeasure is not having one nearby. Most municipal deployments are funded by HOA / city-council votes that almost nobody shows up to. We've yanked two cameras off our own neighborhood by going to one meeting and being polite.

The yard-sign approach works because it surfaces the issue to neighbors who wouldn't have noticed. We sell two-packs of heavy-gauge aluminum signs that survive a Texas summer; we also have a free PDF if you'd rather print your own.

Letter template: our pre-written, council-meeting-tested letter is in the kit you'll get when you buy the signs — or you can email [email protected] and we'll send it free.

Modern ALPR cameras don't just read plates — many models also capture occupant-facing images and run face-recognition or "vehicle attribute" classifiers (driver gender, glasses, hat). The illuminator that lets the plate read at night is also illuminating your face.

That's where UNS-IR1 comes in. Our IR-blocking glasses zero out the eye region in the camera's NIR feed — which is the region face-recognition systems weight most heavily — without making you look like you're wearing tinted shades during the day.