Privacy and security

What we refuse

• No accounts, passwords, or identity providers.
• No cookies for tracking. Local watch lists never leave this browser.
• No geolocation prompt. Search a place instead.
• No map tile CDN — the globe is drawn here, so pan/zoom is not leaked.
• No open URL proxy. Stills come from an allowlist of official hosts, matched exactly to a catalogued camera.
• Still fetches follow at most one allowlisted redirect (needed for operator snapshot hosts that bounce to a CDN). Anything else is dropped.
• Unsecured consumer cameras, misconfigured devices, and closed-circuit city surveillance (CDMX C5 and the like) are out of scope.
• Encrypted, cellular, and tactical radio are out of scope. We do not decrypt.
• This map does not identify faces, plates, voices, home addresses, or a chosen car by color or shape across cameras.
• Plates typed for a public FOIA check never reach ScopeHerder — that search opens someone else’s site.
• There is no government edition, bulk export, or movement history. A badge does not unlock a different map.
• Unlisted, passworded, or misconfigured cameras — including so-called deep-web webcam indexes — are refused.
• Do not use this map to follow a person or a car. That is the line this product is built around.

Not a vendor. Not a herd they own.

ScopeHerder is an independent map. It is not a plate-reader company, not their dashboard, and not a way to watch their closed video. Gold diamonds are locations volunteers tagged on OpenStreetMap. The pictures stay off this app on purpose.

United States only

On a published host, the mesh checks the network country on the server and refuses stills and the catalog when that country is not the United States or a US territory. Detected VPNs, proxies, and datacenter exits are refused too — a tunnel can claim any country, so it is not treated as a US home network. This is an access policy, not encryption. Quiet residential VPNs can still slip through. We do not ask the browser for GPS.

Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment limits government searches. It does not, by itself, police a private map of feeds an agency already posted for travelers. Watching one public traffic still is not a search. Building a warrantless dossier of where a particular person or car went — the thing Flock sells to police — is the live constitutional fight: United States v. Jones (GPS on a car), Carpenter v. United States (long-term location records), and the “mosaic” argument that a grid of public cameras can become a search even when each frame was visible from the street.

ScopeHerder is built so it cannot be that grid — and so you can see how little stands between the public mesh and a poorer copy of what Flock already sells. The cameras, the scanners, the pins are already out. Coordinated badly, they would still sketch a life; they would just do it less accurately than a closed vendor database. No plate reading. No face matching. No voice ID. No following a chosen vehicle by color or silhouette from camera to camera. No index of gadgets that were never published. Stills are fetched when you open them, then dropped. The point is the warning, not the dossier. This is product design, not a court opinion, and it is not legal advice. If a government desk pointed this mesh at one person, that use could still raise Fourth Amendment questions. We refuse the features that would make that easy.

ALPR readers

Gold diamonds are automated license plate readers and speed cameras mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). They are locations, not live pictures. Closed vendors do not publish a public viewing feed; we will not scrape one. A public FOIA plate check opens on its own site. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance remains the fuller research map.

What is stored

Herds and pins live in this browser's local storage. Share links encode camera IDs in the URL — they are not written to a ScopeHerder server. Operator stills are fetched when you open a camera or run a scan, then discarded. Live video and radio stream from the operator. We do not keep a copy.

Live mesh

The core catalog is curated. The live mesh hydrates official feeds agencies already publish for travelers and science: Maryland CHART, NYC DOT TMC, Caltrans CWWP2, US 511 networks that expose a camera JSON (Florida, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Utah, Idaho, Louisiana, North Carolina, Alaska, New England, Iowa), Canadian 511 (British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, Yukon, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island), TfL JamCams, Fintraffic weathercams, USGS volcano stills and YouTube lives, NPS park cameras, operator-published boardwalk webcams, and El Paso / Juárez traveler bridge HLS. About two dozen US states hide cameras behind HTML maps or private keys — those states appear as a single portal pin that opens their official traveler page. Washington, New Jersey, Delaware, and DC traveler desks are listed the same way. CBP border waits and Mexico SCT / CAPUFE highway pages are pins, not embedded video. Mexican city C5 CCTV is refused. NOAA Weather Radio is a pin to weather.gov. Scanner pins are volunteer public-safety feeds. Audio plays on Broadcastify or OpenMHz, not inside this app. That is so a directory does not pretend to be a station. YouTube lives play from YouTube's nocookie embed. Operator webcam players (ipcamlive) are allowlisted by alias, never by open URL. If a host is unreachable, the rest of the catalog still works. Agency 511 and OSM ALPR lists refresh about every fifteen minutes while the mesh is open, so cameras an operator adds later can appear without a republish. Curated scanner pins and core notes do not invent themselves; only published JSON and OSM nodes do.

Thirty-day radio tape

Maryland CHART does not archive camera video. Public trunked-radio networks (OpenMHz and similar) keep about 30 days of unencrypted calls for free. ScopeHerder points the research tape at those archives and plays calls when the archive host allows it. We do not run our own recorder, and we do not charge for replay.

Credit

Traffic stills belong to the agency that published them (state 511 programs, CHART, Caltrans, NYC DOT, and the other traveler desks named on each pin). ALPR and speed-camera coordinates are © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Scanner audio is volunteer-hosted on Broadcastify; where a trunked system is listed, the research tape points at OpenMHz. NOAA Weather Radio is a National Weather Service service — we link their pages rather than invent relays. None of those operators asked for this map, and none of them endorse it.