Home Depot And Lowe's Are Scanning Your License Plates: Here's Why

If you've gone hardware shopping within the past few months, you may have noticed something new in the parking lot of your local Home Depot or Lowe's: Flock cameras, posted up on poles with their solar panels, scanning the cars and people that enter and leave. These are the same cameras that cops use to dole out tickets and harass citizens, and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses to track anyone suspected of the heinous crime of being born in another country. But why is the high-tech panopticon coming for your lumber runs?

Flock has had cameras in Lowe's and Home Depot parking lots since at least August of last year, according to reporting from 404 Media. Home Depot explicitly says on its website that it doesn't share this camera data with federal law enforcement, but the word "federal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there — the company absolutely shares data with local law enforcement, which is all too happy to dig around on the feds' behalf. 

Of course, the page on which Home Depot makes its big "not cooperating with federal agencies" claim gives up the game a bit. That page is titled "IMMIGRATION ACTIVITY IN OUR PARKING LOTS," and is all about ICE activity on Home Depot property — federal agents rounding up the day laborers who hang out near stores like Home Depot, Lowe's, and U-Haul to offer themselves as help for folks taking on home improvement projects or moving. Lowe's buries its statement on parking lot cameras deep in its broader Privacy and Security Statement page, where it too says it cooperates with state and local law enforcement to hand over footage and data. 

Of course there's also the other benefit of the panopticon, where everyone is on their best behavior when they can't tell if they're being watched. Just because we've shifted from "not knowing where the warden is looking" to "not knowing if anyone is sifting through all the data they have on you" doesn't make it any less effective. It really is such a shame that these incredibly invasive cameras are constantly being knocked down, spray painted, and damaged.