While sitting in a 7-Eleven parking lot in Chicago waiting on his fiancée to come out with a drink, a man got a talking-to from the property itself. A solar-powered camera tower parked by the store sign detected him and broadcast an order to stop loitering. He filmed the moment, and the comments turned into a discussion about how much of American public space is now watched by machines that talk back.
The 13-second TikTok was posted earlier this week by Trash god (@trashbagdeity161), a Chicago creator whose channel mixes scenes from city life with political commentary. It has pulled more than 427,000 views. The shot zooms slowly across the lot and settles on a trailer near the sign, stacked with solar panels and a battery of pan-tilt-zoom cameras.
‘It Just Told Me Not To Loiter’
“So I’m at 7-Eleven waiting for my fiancée who’s inside getting a drink, and this thing just told me to not loiter,” Trash god says in the clip, which he later noted took place in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the city’s Northside.
In the comments he described how it worked. The tower stayed quiet for the first five minutes he was there, he wrote, until he sat down. “Then a small white light came on, clearly a camera recognizing body movement and position, then it broadcasted.” His caption summed up his feelings about the chain: “Eeeehhh [expletive] 7/11 after this [expletive].”
What The Camera Actually Is
Most of the comment section insisted it was a Flock camera, the automated license plate readers that have spread across American roads. Trash god corrected them, and he was right. The unit is a mobile surveillance trailer of the kind built by LiveView Technologies, or LVT, whose lettering sharp-eyed viewers spotted on the side. Flock reads plates; LVT’s solar towers have cameras on a mast plus a two-way speaker, and the company sells AI-driven “talk-downs” that detect a person and trigger a spoken warning. That lines up with the white light and the broadcast Trash god described…