MapQuest's new tool can help you avoid Flock cameras

Is life in 2026 feeling sufficiently dystopian for you? Between increasingly advanced AI causing us to stress about everything from our jobs to component prices, and the rise of far-right governments around the world, this is definitely not the utopian paradise you might have been hoping for. But from all that horrible mess, one savior has emerged to offer a beacon of hope — just who would have ever thought it would be MapQuest?

MapQuest was great at helping us getting around… 20 years ago, before Google Maps arrived, anyway. And just like so many other turn-of-the-century dot coms, it quickly found itself fading into the background.

To the service’s credit, despite the odds it’s managed to stick around to this day, and earlier this year found itself back in the spotlight for heroically refusing to embrace the current US administration’s ham-fisted attempt to rename Lake Ontario. While the likes of Apple Maps and Google Maps obsequiously complied, MapQuest isn’t playing with that kind of nonsense.

If that already resonated with you, MapQuest is following it up with another move we think you’ll like. Surveillance cameras in public have been ubiquitous since early this century, but recently those equipped with automated license plate recognition (ALPR), like popular models from Flock, have been finding themselves in the news. Between concerns of police misuse and incorrectly targeting the wrong drivers, Flock is showing up on a lot of people’s naughty list.

If you’d rather have as little of that in your life as possible, MapQuest has you covered, announcing a new Surveillance Layer for its maps over on Bluesky:

Turn on the Surveillance Layer in Map Options to see known license plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other outdoor surveillance cameras.

Granted, once you see just how many cameras are out there (and let’s try not to think about how many might have escaped MapQuest’s attention), perhaps avoiding them isn’t really an option. But at the very least, we love the idea of being informed about their presence. The directional aspect, showing us what’s in a camera’s field of view, is an especially nice touch.

Is all this starting to become enough to tempt you into giving MapQuest a fresh try? Ready to embrace your inner ’90s kid? At least this time around, we won’t have to print all the maps out!