Reminder to archive all of these posts by people affiliated with the project for when the inevitable ultimate enshittification happens and they attempt to backpedal.
Skimming the map, I see many listed are in parking lots for Home Depot and Lowe's. I assume that's because of high dollar items and common theft issues? I'm wondering if those cameras are specifically operated by this Flock company, or others as well.
They are in my experience flock only. They are financially a smart decision for those types of businesses. They one get some analytics tracking out for the box(which a Walmart might already be doing themselves) but more importantly they bridge local police with know shoplifters. As soon as the identified car enters the parking lot both the police and Walmart know.
A map can only tell you where the fixed position cameras are. Both police cars and tow truck companies are scanning every plate on every car they drive past and share that info with each other.
I have very mixed feelings about this tech. On one hand there does feel like a deteriorating society, more petty crime, I almost never see police anymore.
Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets. Lots of street racing during the day on busy streets and just general chaos. Without a doubt education and parenting is a root problem for most of these issues.
The idea of people able to simple track cars is elegant and can be a huge multiplier of effectiveness for police. I am generally not opposed to it. The problem as we know is there really is not good safety guards on it. Too many law enforcement have used it improperly. The root there is this idea that the thin blue line exists, police are under educated, trained and paid.
> Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets.
I do think public sentiment would swing hard against this type of widespread tracking if we could see laws enforced more regularly.
I live in a low crime city, but even I’m growing frustrated with the flagrant violation of basic laws. We take the kids to nearby park where it’s becoming common for maybe 1 in 100 cars to speed 50-60mph down the adjoining road (twice the speed limit). 1 in 100 doesn’t sound like a lot but it means i see it several times during a single visit. They don’t slow down or stop at the crosswalks.
Only 10 years ago, I remember speed patrols on this road once a week. They would nab anyone flagrantly blowing crosswalks or going significantly over the speed limit. It had a huge effect and you rarely saw violations.
Now: Nothing. I was talking to my wife and we couldn’t remember the last time there was an officer doing speed checks on that road, despite the constant problems and being adjacent to the biggest park around.
The basic laws and regulations just don’t seem to matter any more. Even the trails we like to hike where dogs are only allowed on-leash is full of off-leash dogs. There was a time when you risked getting random a ticket if you were caught with an off-leash dog, but now it’s not a possibility anyone even thinks about. The spot checks and ticket writing previously kept everyone honest, but now it’s rare to see a dog on leash. My friend’s dog (on leash) was attacked by someone’s off leash dog recently and they barely wrestled it away. A visiting friend of mine was bitten by an off leash dog while walking, though it was a small dog she could shake off. It’s still all so bizarre to me that any enforcement of the rules seemingly disappeared overnight.
I know it’s nothing relative to the people living in areas where shoplifting is rampant or you have to fear violent crime, but I think the root cause is similar: A complete lack of visible enforcement emboldens people to ignore them.
I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even...
> Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that your town is way richer than these nearby cities and has a way higher ratio of police to the kind of crime police want to solve hence the "scraping the bottom of the barrel" behavior.
So much of the policing problem is a result of towns with no real problems hiring a bunch of cops to go after little problems and then these bored cops who have nothing to do wind up doing revenue policing or pervasive fishing, acting as an enforcement arm for the petty civil portions of local government, etc, etc.
Like sure, Detroit or some other city with "real crime" might have a big enough department to harbor a rogue drug unit or whatever but at least your average beat cop is well fed enough on "real crime" they don't need to engage in bad behavior to meet quotas.
I get the temptation to attribute the popularity of these systems to lazy police with nothing better to do, but from personal experience there’s more to it.
I live in a medium sized residential development about 15 minutes outside Austin. A few years ago we started getting multiple incidents per month of attempted car theft where the thieves would go driveway to driveway checking for unlocked doors. Sometimes the resident footage revealed the thieves were armed while doing so. In a couple of cases they did actually steal a car.
The sheriffs couldn’t really do much about it because a) it was happening to most of the neighborhoods around us, b) the timing was unpredictable, and c) the manpower required to camp out to attempt to catch these in progress would be pretty high.
Our neighborhood installed Flock cameras at the sole entrance in response to growing resident concerns. We also put in a strict policy around access control by non law enforcement. In the ~two years since they were installed, we’ve had two or three incidents total whereas immediately prior it was at least as many each month. And in those cases the sheriffs could easily figure out which vehicles had entered or left during that time. I continue to see stories of attempted car thefts from adjacent neighborhoods several times per month.
I totally get the privacy concerns around this and am inherently suspicious of any new surveillance. I also get the reflexive dismissal of their value. In this case it has been a clear win for our community through the obvious deterrent factor and the much higher likelihood of having evidence if anything does happen.
Our Flock cameras do not show on the map here, btw.
If you don't want to take the risk destroying or spray painting the lense or solar panels of these devices, a picket sign installed right in front of it works pretty well while probably not getting you sent to jail. You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss.
> You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss
This isn't effective protest action unless you generate media that debates the downsides of the cameras. (If it just gets branded as vigilantism, you may wind up increasing support for them.)
This is excellent advice and a nice (theoretical at least) example of why protests and actions that don't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors.
> why protests and actions that doesn't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors
The point is to think through (and shape) the consequences.
Trash bag is nice but leaves interpretation to the viewer. Trash bag with a sign is better, but the ambiguity of the action together with the conciseness requirement of physical signage makes for a difficult combo. Trash bag with a QR code highlighting (depending on your town's partisan lean, of course) when "authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois" [1], or that Flock Safety "is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches" [2] is better still. (Best would be something that concisely conveys the problem while blocking the sign. I'm not having anything readily come to mind...Lady Liberty holding her palm to the camera is kitsch.)
Still, just raising awareness is table stakes. Ideally such activity comes ahead of a petition drive, or town hall where a series of plants raise objections to the company.
I did always wonder if the sort of green laser pointer that could light matches would wreck the sensors.
The biggest use of these cameras in the UK is in car parks so that predatory parking companies can fine you £60 for going a nano-second over the time you paid for.
Here in Belgium the contract for these cameras on highways was given to a family run business who charged nothing at all for the hardware and installation in exchange for a decent cut of every fine that's issues with them. They're financially very healthy.
What we need is a leak of a Flock database. Ideally, due to a security fuck-up by someone other than the jurisdiction that installed them. (Company itself, or another city doing Flock's warrantless search feature.)
Having granular location data for an entire town's license plates should still be creepy and damaging enough that it gets these things torn out and replaced with something more thoughtfully designed.
(Side note: Flock Safety has paid Mercury nearly half a million dollars in lobbying fees [1]. One of the two lobbyists they hired also lobbies for Tencent [2]. The other for Alibaba [3]. In case you're talking to your local, state and/or federal electeds.)
> What we need is a leak of a Flock database. Ideally, due to a security fuck-up by someone other than the jurisdiction that installed them. (Company itself, or another city doing Flock's warrantless search feature.)
With how poor Flock's own security is, using unauthenticated APIs for the vast majority of their service, and camera access points using hardcoded passwords, anyone who's even half motivated could have already done this.
In anticipation of this happening someone should build an open source project that processes data points from these cameras, reconstructs movement, correlates the data with with various public and non-public databases, and provides a searchable user interface that will make the average person shit their pants through combination of panic and disgust when they see it.
Then just wait for the inevitable data leak and let the public track the movements of every politician and lobbyist (by name), correlated with their other activities, as well as track anonymized members of the general public.
The average person won't ever "get it" unless they see a system like that for themselves. That might not be enough either but it would lead to some progress if executed well.
> uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250
> A simple Python application to test adversarial noise attacks on license plate recognition systems (see my PlateShapez demo) and create an output dataset to train more effective attack models.. small, hardly-noticeable, random gaussian shapes to confuse AI license plate readers
Thanks for the links. I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch. How many of those cars on the roads have I seen before?
My hunch is that, on my local journeys, I have seen the majority of cars before, to just see them as generic cars, with none of them special, apart from a few owned by friends and a few idiosyncratic vehicles (tractors, pre-war classic cars and anything else rare).
I could be wrong with most cars being totally new to me, maybe not on the road outside my door, but on the big road that my road joins on to.
My use case is as a cyclist. So that Raspberry Pi will need to be carried somehow. There aren't too many cyclists around in my neck of the woods, therefore, even though I might see all cars as generic boxes, their drivers might see me as 'there is that stupid cyclist again', hopefully to give me space on the road.
We all have to get along on the roads and I don't want any conflict, mostly because I will need to use the same roads again and I wouldn't want to meet someone on the road after some silly road-rage type of incident. Therefore, knowing how many cars are actually new to me would be useful to know.
This applies to so much else, even the birds in the garden, where I can't tell one sparrow from another. It would be great to know which of them are residents and which ones are from out of town. Birds don't wear number plates though.
Maybe I'm less sensitive to this coming from the UK, where we're quited to ANPR, but this feels pretty okay to me. When you drive a giant hunk of metal, you accept a higher burden of government surveillance.
Why accept surveillance and tracking without a narrow and well-defined scope? It is one thing to track cars for estimating traffic velocity, it is another entirely to create a national database of all locations any given individual has been seen, with minimal oversight to the purpose for collecting and using that data.
> all locations any given individual has been seen
This is perhaps another reason people in the UK might be more chill about ANPR: we're smaller and incrementally less carbrained, so to describe ANPR as tracking "all locations any given individual has been seen" sounds like wild hyperbole.
(Of course all our police forces are frothing at the mouth to roll out facial recognition everywhere they can, so kicking off a bit more about surveillance might not be a bad idea...)
Here in the UK we also have London's congestion charge.
All around the outskirts of London on all the main arterial roads, there are ANPR cameras tracking number plates to fine you, if you have not paid the £15 charge for entering the city.
A worrying example of ANPR.
I visited my mum one weekend, she lives over 300 miles from where I live on the egde of London.
She had a phone call while I was there from the police. They were asking to speak to me!
They said that they were concerned that there were two cars with the same registration number plate. Could I check that my car was still outside my mums home.
They had stopped another car, not the same make as mine, in London with the same number plate. The police said that the other car had been involved in criminal activity.
I can only assume that they tracked my car over 300 miles with ANPR, checked out who I was, then did a family association check, found my mum's contact details and called to speak to me.
I also assume that they must have already been to my home address and found I was not home.
Also highly likely doing deep analysis of /every/ journey as predictive policing
"We can use ANPR on investigations or we can use it looking forward in a proactive, intelligence way. Things like building up the lifestyle of criminals - where they are going to be at certain times. We seek to link the criminal to the vehicle through intelligence. Vehicles moving on the roads are open to police scrutiny at any time. The Road Traffic Act gives us the right to stop vehicles at any time for any purpose" - Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and Chair of the ACPO ANPR Steering Group" ( source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... )
Of course when he said "criminals" he meant "criminals and also innocent people"
This is a list of datasets, not of restrictions, it seems?
When they say “ Information captured at the Roadside Automatic Number Plate Recognition system. Only vehicles matching specified criteria (e.g. expired test) are captured.” - meaning, that’s what in the dataset. But they have to read every plate to check its expiration status etc. they just don’t put it in this dataset.
But also … how is ANPR in Europe PII? Is there a public/semi-public database that connects plates to owners?
In Norway the plates to owner database is public, and you can either use the free government service or for profit ones. To look them up.
Basically ownership of vehicles is not viewed as private information. So it isn’t covered by privacy legislation. But tracking where the car is, that is covered. That doesn’t stop, speed traps reading car plates, nor parking tracking with cameras. But that info can’t be sold for other purposes.
Are you aware that we had overhead cameras on the streets for a couple of decades, or more?
They are used to read - and recognize - plates.
The official use is to check if the car is insured, or if a stolen / marked car is going through the road, in both cases the police is dispatched to check on the vehichle
It's full of ANPR camera's here (BE) what are you talking about ?
They are used on highways to monitor average speed and in cities to check that no "illegal" cars enter the city. Illegal being ones that don't comply with euronorms anymore.
Yes, they are the key tech behind "average speed enforcement zones", where you get ticketed for speeding based on your "entry/exit" timestamps on a section of road.
The linked new articles talk about some private company selling camera access to law enforcement. I don't think that's a popular setup in the EU, EU law enforcement/traffic authorities seems more likely to run the cameras themselves.
In the US, it's because of our protections that, ironically, we're at this point. This is essentially laundering the 4th Amendment through private industry, which has been a masaive issue for many years now.
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
— Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025,
YC CEO while defending Flock on X.
https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
Lmao, hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic
Reminder to archive all of these posts by people affiliated with the project for when the inevitable ultimate enshittification happens and they attempt to backpedal.
don't bite the feed that feeds you
Skimming the map, I see many listed are in parking lots for Home Depot and Lowe's. I assume that's because of high dollar items and common theft issues? I'm wondering if those cameras are specifically operated by this Flock company, or others as well.
It is specifically Flock. For a bit of data, check around page 110 of this report on data sharing between camera operators: https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2025/07/23/JCSO_Agency_S...
They are in my experience flock only. They are financially a smart decision for those types of businesses. They one get some analytics tracking out for the box(which a Walmart might already be doing themselves) but more importantly they bridge local police with know shoplifters. As soon as the identified car enters the parking lot both the police and Walmart know.
A map can only tell you where the fixed position cameras are. Both police cars and tow truck companies are scanning every plate on every car they drive past and share that info with each other.
I have very mixed feelings about this tech. On one hand there does feel like a deteriorating society, more petty crime, I almost never see police anymore.
Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets. Lots of street racing during the day on busy streets and just general chaos. Without a doubt education and parenting is a root problem for most of these issues.
The idea of people able to simple track cars is elegant and can be a huge multiplier of effectiveness for police. I am generally not opposed to it. The problem as we know is there really is not good safety guards on it. Too many law enforcement have used it improperly. The root there is this idea that the thin blue line exists, police are under educated, trained and paid.
It’s a very mixed feeling for myself.
> Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets.
I do think public sentiment would swing hard against this type of widespread tracking if we could see laws enforced more regularly.
I live in a low crime city, but even I’m growing frustrated with the flagrant violation of basic laws. We take the kids to nearby park where it’s becoming common for maybe 1 in 100 cars to speed 50-60mph down the adjoining road (twice the speed limit). 1 in 100 doesn’t sound like a lot but it means i see it several times during a single visit. They don’t slow down or stop at the crosswalks.
Only 10 years ago, I remember speed patrols on this road once a week. They would nab anyone flagrantly blowing crosswalks or going significantly over the speed limit. It had a huge effect and you rarely saw violations.
Now: Nothing. I was talking to my wife and we couldn’t remember the last time there was an officer doing speed checks on that road, despite the constant problems and being adjacent to the biggest park around.
The basic laws and regulations just don’t seem to matter any more. Even the trails we like to hike where dogs are only allowed on-leash is full of off-leash dogs. There was a time when you risked getting random a ticket if you were caught with an off-leash dog, but now it’s not a possibility anyone even thinks about. The spot checks and ticket writing previously kept everyone honest, but now it’s rare to see a dog on leash. My friend’s dog (on leash) was attacked by someone’s off leash dog recently and they barely wrestled it away. A visiting friend of mine was bitten by an off leash dog while walking, though it was a small dog she could shake off. It’s still all so bizarre to me that any enforcement of the rules seemingly disappeared overnight.
I know it’s nothing relative to the people living in areas where shoplifting is rampant or you have to fear violent crime, but I think the root cause is similar: A complete lack of visible enforcement emboldens people to ignore them.
Huh...
I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even...
I don't like that one bit.
> Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that your town is way richer than these nearby cities and has a way higher ratio of police to the kind of crime police want to solve hence the "scraping the bottom of the barrel" behavior.
So much of the policing problem is a result of towns with no real problems hiring a bunch of cops to go after little problems and then these bored cops who have nothing to do wind up doing revenue policing or pervasive fishing, acting as an enforcement arm for the petty civil portions of local government, etc, etc.
Like sure, Detroit or some other city with "real crime" might have a big enough department to harbor a rogue drug unit or whatever but at least your average beat cop is well fed enough on "real crime" they don't need to engage in bad behavior to meet quotas.
I get the temptation to attribute the popularity of these systems to lazy police with nothing better to do, but from personal experience there’s more to it.
I live in a medium sized residential development about 15 minutes outside Austin. A few years ago we started getting multiple incidents per month of attempted car theft where the thieves would go driveway to driveway checking for unlocked doors. Sometimes the resident footage revealed the thieves were armed while doing so. In a couple of cases they did actually steal a car.
The sheriffs couldn’t really do much about it because a) it was happening to most of the neighborhoods around us, b) the timing was unpredictable, and c) the manpower required to camp out to attempt to catch these in progress would be pretty high.
Our neighborhood installed Flock cameras at the sole entrance in response to growing resident concerns. We also put in a strict policy around access control by non law enforcement. In the ~two years since they were installed, we’ve had two or three incidents total whereas immediately prior it was at least as many each month. And in those cases the sheriffs could easily figure out which vehicles had entered or left during that time. I continue to see stories of attempted car thefts from adjacent neighborhoods several times per month.
I totally get the privacy concerns around this and am inherently suspicious of any new surveillance. I also get the reflexive dismissal of their value. In this case it has been a clear win for our community through the obvious deterrent factor and the much higher likelihood of having evidence if anything does happen.
Our Flock cameras do not show on the map here, btw.
Could likely be traffic detection cameras mistaken for ALPR.
Possible, but there are plenty of instances of that sort of layout.
One way to cross-correlate is to pull 811 records. This map overlays the Deflock data with 811 locations: https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/
If you don't want to take the risk destroying or spray painting the lense or solar panels of these devices, a picket sign installed right in front of it works pretty well while probably not getting you sent to jail. You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss.
> You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss
This isn't effective protest action unless you generate media that debates the downsides of the cameras. (If it just gets branded as vigilantism, you may wind up increasing support for them.)
This is excellent advice and a nice (theoretical at least) example of why protests and actions that don't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors.
> why protests and actions that doesn't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors
The point is to think through (and shape) the consequences.
Trash bag is nice but leaves interpretation to the viewer. Trash bag with a sign is better, but the ambiguity of the action together with the conciseness requirement of physical signage makes for a difficult combo. Trash bag with a QR code highlighting (depending on your town's partisan lean, of course) when "authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois" [1], or that Flock Safety "is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches" [2] is better still. (Best would be something that concisely conveys the problem while blocking the sign. I'm not having anything readily come to mind...Lady Liberty holding her palm to the camera is kitsch.)
Still, just raising awareness is table stakes. Ideally such activity comes ahead of a petition drive, or town hall where a series of plants raise objections to the company.
[1] https://www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-searched-license-plate-c...
[2] https://www.404media.co/license-plate-reader-company-flock-i...
Probably why they are mounted 4 meters high
I have this 35 Watt laser I scored off aliexpress, it runs off 24V. I wonder...
I did always wonder if the sort of green laser pointer that could light matches would wreck the sensors.
The biggest use of these cameras in the UK is in car parks so that predatory parking companies can fine you £60 for going a nano-second over the time you paid for.
> I did always wonder if the sort of green laser pointer that could light matches would wreck the sensors.
It absolutely can.
i feel like with AR glasses and phones and dash cams etc there just isn't going to be a place without ALPR readers going 24/7 soon?
Here in Belgium the contract for these cameras on highways was given to a family run business who charged nothing at all for the hardware and installation in exchange for a decent cut of every fine that's issues with them. They're financially very healthy.
That's disgusting.
What we need is a leak of a Flock database. Ideally, due to a security fuck-up by someone other than the jurisdiction that installed them. (Company itself, or another city doing Flock's warrantless search feature.)
Having granular location data for an entire town's license plates should still be creepy and damaging enough that it gets these things torn out and replaced with something more thoughtfully designed.
(Side note: Flock Safety has paid Mercury nearly half a million dollars in lobbying fees [1]. One of the two lobbyists they hired also lobbies for Tencent [2]. The other for Alibaba [3]. In case you're talking to your local, state and/or federal electeds.)
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summa...
[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summa...
> What we need is a leak of a Flock database. Ideally, due to a security fuck-up by someone other than the jurisdiction that installed them. (Company itself, or another city doing Flock's warrantless search feature.)
With how poor Flock's own security is, using unauthenticated APIs for the vast majority of their service, and camera access points using hardcoded passwords, anyone who's even half motivated could have already done this.
That didn't work for cellular location data, it probably won't work for license plate readers.
> didn't work for cellular location data
The fact that the data would be local is why I suspect the response would be different.
> What we need is a leak of a Flock database
In anticipation of this happening someone should build an open source project that processes data points from these cameras, reconstructs movement, correlates the data with with various public and non-public databases, and provides a searchable user interface that will make the average person shit their pants through combination of panic and disgust when they see it.
Then just wait for the inevitable data leak and let the public track the movements of every politician and lobbyist (by name), correlated with their other activities, as well as track anonymized members of the general public.
The average person won't ever "get it" unless they see a system like that for themselves. That might not be enough either but it would lead to some progress if executed well.
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-camera...
> uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250
https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround
> A simple Python application to test adversarial noise attacks on license plate recognition systems (see my PlateShapez demo) and create an output dataset to train more effective attack models.. small, hardly-noticeable, random gaussian shapes to confuse AI license plate readers
"Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices" (250 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698
Thanks for the links. I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch. How many of those cars on the roads have I seen before?
My hunch is that, on my local journeys, I have seen the majority of cars before, to just see them as generic cars, with none of them special, apart from a few owned by friends and a few idiosyncratic vehicles (tractors, pre-war classic cars and anything else rare).
I could be wrong with most cars being totally new to me, maybe not on the road outside my door, but on the big road that my road joins on to.
My use case is as a cyclist. So that Raspberry Pi will need to be carried somehow. There aren't too many cyclists around in my neck of the woods, therefore, even though I might see all cars as generic boxes, their drivers might see me as 'there is that stupid cyclist again', hopefully to give me space on the road.
We all have to get along on the roads and I don't want any conflict, mostly because I will need to use the same roads again and I wouldn't want to meet someone on the road after some silly road-rage type of incident. Therefore, knowing how many cars are actually new to me would be useful to know.
This applies to so much else, even the birds in the garden, where I can't tell one sparrow from another. It would be great to know which of them are residents and which ones are from out of town. Birds don't wear number plates though.
> I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch
Check out OpenALPR. Tested it out on some traffic footage in my region, pretty much nailed them all including the make and model of the car.
Crowd-sourced license plate reader map; browse map, report a camera.
This is quite tame compared to tracking cookies on the web!
it is easier to clear your cookies than get a new license plate.
Maybe I'm less sensitive to this coming from the UK, where we're quited to ANPR, but this feels pretty okay to me. When you drive a giant hunk of metal, you accept a higher burden of government surveillance.
Why accept surveillance and tracking without a narrow and well-defined scope? It is one thing to track cars for estimating traffic velocity, it is another entirely to create a national database of all locations any given individual has been seen, with minimal oversight to the purpose for collecting and using that data.
> all locations any given individual has been seen
This is perhaps another reason people in the UK might be more chill about ANPR: we're smaller and incrementally less carbrained, so to describe ANPR as tracking "all locations any given individual has been seen" sounds like wild hyperbole.
(Of course all our police forces are frothing at the mouth to roll out facial recognition everywhere they can, so kicking off a bit more about surveillance might not be a bad idea...)
Here in the UK we also have London's congestion charge.
All around the outskirts of London on all the main arterial roads, there are ANPR cameras tracking number plates to fine you, if you have not paid the £15 charge for entering the city.
A worrying example of ANPR.
I visited my mum one weekend, she lives over 300 miles from where I live on the egde of London.
She had a phone call while I was there from the police. They were asking to speak to me!
They said that they were concerned that there were two cars with the same registration number plate. Could I check that my car was still outside my mums home.
They had stopped another car, not the same make as mine, in London with the same number plate. The police said that the other car had been involved in criminal activity.
I can only assume that they tracked my car over 300 miles with ANPR, checked out who I was, then did a family association check, found my mum's contact details and called to speak to me.
I also assume that they must have already been to my home address and found I was not home.
Or they called your mum because she's your mum and top of the list to call? No creepy additional surveillance required there.
They do plenty of creepy surveillance if your vehicle is flagged on the central database (eg for having been near a protest)
https://www.burtoncopeland.com/news/police-are-watching-your...
Also highly likely doing deep analysis of /every/ journey as predictive policing
"We can use ANPR on investigations or we can use it looking forward in a proactive, intelligence way. Things like building up the lifestyle of criminals - where they are going to be at certain times. We seek to link the criminal to the vehicle through intelligence. Vehicles moving on the roads are open to police scrutiny at any time. The Road Traffic Act gives us the right to stop vehicles at any time for any purpose" - Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and Chair of the ACPO ANPR Steering Group" ( source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... )
Of course when he said "criminals" he meant "criminals and also innocent people"
What list?
I wonder if these things read and decode QR codes on cars?
Then you may stick QR code on bumper pointing to web page you control and track when something hits the page.
Great resource for planning where to buy a house!
Unless you don't carry a phone, they know where you are at all times anyway
If not realtime, then historically, without a warrant, for any reason they want
Not saying that's okay but it's what's been happening for decades and well known/documented
They even know every single person who visited Epstein's Island via cellphone tracking
One more reason to love GDPR: this kind of thing is illegal in the EU.
Not if the governments do it (strictly speaking, that'd be "data collected for the core functioning of the service").
It still looks like there are more data controls in the EU for ANPRs (number plate versus license plate) [1]. (EDIT: Nvm.)
[1] https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/automatic-number-plate-...
This is a list of datasets, not of restrictions, it seems?
When they say “ Information captured at the Roadside Automatic Number Plate Recognition system. Only vehicles matching specified criteria (e.g. expired test) are captured.” - meaning, that’s what in the dataset. But they have to read every plate to check its expiration status etc. they just don’t put it in this dataset.
But also … how is ANPR in Europe PII? Is there a public/semi-public database that connects plates to owners?
In Norway the plates to owner database is public, and you can either use the free government service or for profit ones. To look them up.
Basically ownership of vehicles is not viewed as private information. So it isn’t covered by privacy legislation. But tracking where the car is, that is covered. That doesn’t stop, speed traps reading car plates, nor parking tracking with cameras. But that info can’t be sold for other purposes.
Are you aware that we had overhead cameras on the streets for a couple of decades, or more?
They are used to read - and recognize - plates.
The official use is to check if the car is insured, or if a stolen / marked car is going through the road, in both cases the police is dispatched to check on the vehichle
It's full of ANPR camera's here (BE) what are you talking about ?
They are used on highways to monitor average speed and in cities to check that no "illegal" cars enter the city. Illegal being ones that don't comply with euronorms anymore.
ANPRs are very popular and common in the EU. More so than in the US, even.
Yes, they are the key tech behind "average speed enforcement zones", where you get ticketed for speeding based on your "entry/exit" timestamps on a section of road.
The linked new articles talk about some private company selling camera access to law enforcement. I don't think that's a popular setup in the EU, EU law enforcement/traffic authorities seems more likely to run the cameras themselves.
In the US, it's because of our protections that, ironically, we're at this point. This is essentially laundering the 4th Amendment through private industry, which has been a masaive issue for many years now.
EU is the birthplace of this type of tech usage.