Motorola Solutions

Motorola Solutions Inc. (not to be confused with Motorola Mobility LLC.) is a publicly traded company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. They provide a variety of equipment for public safety and surveillance purposes. They became more well known in the 2020s, for their subsidiary Vigilant Solutions; they provide mass surveillance systems designed to compete with Flock Safety and Axon. Their automated license plate readers, cameras, and drones feed data into an analytics platform designed to identify and track the whereabouts of every person within their area of deployment. They also sell handheld radios, and a few other products.

Purpose

Motorola advertises that their customers can "easily search for, find and review the location history of a vehicle of interest and determine where it may be located in the future." This is possible through the data collected by their surveillance infrastructure, and analyzed by their artificial intelligence system. Furthermore, they advertise, "jumpstart your investigation by identifying vehicles you may not have known were connected to each other or specific locations."

The idea behind this system, is the same as that of its competitors: To identify each person uniquely, and track all of their movements, activities, relationships, and habits. If a Vigilant Solutions customer decides they want to know more about an individual, they can essentially look back through time, to see all of that persons bast activities and travel, as well detected associations and other habits. Vigilant does not require a warrant for these searches, so law enforcement and private companies alike can search this data at will, with no need to justify the reason.

Additionally, Motorola sells this data to other customers, most of whom are undisclosed.

Data collection methods

In 2026, there was evidence that at least 59 municipalities were customers of Motorola Solutions, not counting many private customers. That number is expected to grow significantly, unless legislation prevents it. As Flock became the primary target of public opposition, new business opportunists were presented to their competitors, including Motorola Solutions.

As has become standard practice for this growing mass surveillance industry, Motorola installs fixed cameras and ALPRs, which scan vehicles, faces, and more for identifying details. These data points are logged, and correlated to all other scans of those identifying details, so that each person's movements can be traced over time. However, compared to the deployment of Flock's surveillance infrastructure, Motorola has a very small footprint. They have been augmenting their widespread visibility, by contracting with vehicle operators including tow truck companies and fleet vehicles, to install mobile ALPRs. These roving ALPRs can provide sporadic coverage over wide areas, and cannot be easily avoided by privacy-conscious members of the public. These mobile scanners are also available to law enforcement agencies and other customers. They also offer these AI-powered data collection systems in other form factors, including body cameras and drones.

Legal and Privacy issues

Although the AI-powered mass surveillance which Motorola offers (through Vigilant) can be useful, it comes with some significant legal and ethical problems. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution provides strong protections against "unreasonable searches and seizures," without a legal warrant, which clearly defines who is being subjected to a search, what place will be searched, and the duration of the search. It also needs to be signed by a judge. Based on legal precedent, tracking the movements of a person over time, is a form of a search, which therefore requires a specific and limited search warrant.

Unfortunately, these systems are also prone to abuse. There have been many cases of those with access to unrestricted tracing data, using it to stalk former romantic partners,, groups of children, and others.

See also

• Flock Safety
• Axon Enterprise
• Rekor Systems