A dystopian surveillance fear has become reality in Texas | Arwa Mahdawi

Law enforcement used license-plate readers in several states to search for a woman who had an abortion

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of lo and behold, the dystopian thing that women and activists warned would happen ends up happening". This time the issue is automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which capture (no prizes for guessing!) license plate data and allow law enforcement to build a picture of where a particular vehicle has been. There's no opting out of being tracked: if you drive, you should simply assume that these cameras, which are sometimes hidden in objects such as traffic cones, are logging your movements. And you should assume that this license plate data can be combined with other surveillance data to paint a very detailed picture of your life. Privacy only exists for our billionaire overlords these days. The rest of us are just data points.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist