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“You are being watched” was the tagline that opened every episode of the television series Person of Interest, which ran from 2011 to 2016 and already feels ancient. The conceit of the show was that the good guys, aided by a friendly AI, could use information from a sea of cameras and microphones to stop crimes before they happened.

That fictional world comes to mind in light of the controversy surrounding Flock Safety, a company that has installed some 120,000 cameras in cities and towns across the U.S. Flock’s automatic license plate recognition system identifies passing cars and stores their identifying details (make, model, a Mets bumper sticker, a cracked rear window) in a searchable database. The utility to law enforcement is obvious.