- Florida bans tools that interfere with license plate detection.
- A simple sticker can fool ALPR AI without hiding the numbers.
- To humans, the license plate remains fully visible and clear.
Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, are just about everywhere now. They’re mounted on police vehicles, perched at intersections, and embedded in streetlight poles across the country. Florida, in response to the growing reach of this tech, recently passed updated legislation aimed at those who obscure or interfere with license plate visibility.
That includes language about devices that prevent recording devices from capturing a plate. In other words, a very clever anti-ALPR tool could now send drivers to jail in Florida… and most people probably couldn’t spot it without help.
More: An Increasing Number Of U.S. Cities Are Using License Plate Reading Cameras
The tech in question comes from musician and engineer Benn Jordan, who recently demonstrated a minimalist decal with small dots on it designed to confuse ALPR cameras without obscuring the plate in any traditional sense. To the human eye, the plate remains perfectly readable.
Numbers, letters, layout, it all checks out. Even ALPR camera images show a fully legible plate. But that’s not the point.
Can the System Be Fooled?
What matters is how the AI sees it. The strategically placed dots exploit how machine-learning models classify images. Instead of identifying the object as a license plate worth logging, the AI often misclassifies it entirely and skips recording it altogether.
Under Florida’s new law, a license plate obscuring device is any manual, electronic, or mechanical device that interferes with the legibility, angular visibility, detectability, or ability to record any feature of a plate. Crucially, the statute doesn’t limit itself to human readability. It explicitly includes interference with recording systems. That’s where Jordan’s decal becomes legally problematic.
Critic and repair-rights advocate Louis Rossmann was quick to point out how broad and potentially dangerous that language is. In calling out the law, Rossmann argued that Florida has effectively criminalized tools that challenge surveillance infrastructure, even when they don’t prevent a human from identifying a vehicle and aren’t used to commit a crime.
Despite that, anyone who uses a tool like the one Jordan built could end up in jail just the same as if they were swerving down the road, drinking and driving.
A Legal Line Drawn by Algorithms
Jordan’s decal doesn’t flip plates, hide numbers, or apply reflective coatings. It doesn’t alter the plate’s color or layout. It simply reveals that ALPR systems rely on fragile pattern recognition, and Florida’s law appears to prioritize the protection of those systems over intent, harm, or human legibility.
Whether Florida lawmakers intended to outlaw machine-learning adversarial tests is unclear. What is clear is that the law’s language is broad enough to catch them anyway… even if most folks can’t even tell there’s something on the plate to begin with.