Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".
I strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue.
And by "strongly suspect" I mean "know because I live in that kind of neighborhood in a different city in a different state".
> strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue
I live in Jackson Hole. None of my neighbours knew what these were. They’re getting taken out.
Don’t presume what folks are worried about without asking them.
I’m pretty confused by the innuendo in the posters comment to even get what they are saying, but I can report from the south side of chicago that surveillance cameras are largely popular across demographics.
You don't know anything about me or about Oak Park. We killed our Flock contract. I did a good bit of the policy lifting to make that happen, including co-writing our initial pilot ALPR police General Order to lock them down and set up the transparency reporting that enabled us to make the case for killing them. But, keep going, I'm interested in what else you can confidently state about my work.
Speaking as a person of color, the government Oak Park prosecuted me for reasons of my blackness which is racist. The controversey that followed, if you ask me, is why the cameras got shot down. Transparency and not being big brother is just a convenient excuse to put a positive spin on it, as politicians do.
Knowing in extreme and annoying detail exactly the series of events that led us to kill our Flock contract, I do not believe this is at all true. I don't think trolling is a good plan here.
There is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers.
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
In New Hampshire, we banned both public and private ALPRs. You can see on the map that the only ones are at toll booths. Those got explicit exemptions in the law.
Isn't that the state with license plates that say "live free or die?" Unless, of course, you have a moral objection to that statement, cf. Wooley v. Maynard.
Do you see anyone claiming the opposite? The point is that they will not write the motto on your license plate if you object.
I get that HN attracts a certain amount of pedantry, but I can't figure out what exactly you're even trying to be pedantic about. There's not single comment here that could be reasonably interpreted as suggesting that "live free or die" isn't their motto
His pedantic point is that due to the way the original question was written, the answer is “yes” regardless if you object or not.
The question was “isn’t that the state with license plates that say ‘live free or die’?” And even if you get a license plate that doesn’t say it, NH is still the state with those plates
They're not that free about beer. Though, more free about beer than liquor. That's only allowed to be sold in state run liquor stores. It was a real head scratcher when I first encountered it.
Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
Yeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
Not automatically. There's aleeady case law(0x1) that ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records, even though the data are stored by Flock (a private vendor), not directly by the city.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
IANAL: That court's decision was based on the contract w/ Flock. It does not move the needle wrt public records.
I may read the decision, testimony, and any amicus briefs. During the 00's, Wash Citizen's for Open Govt had a prominent blindspot wrt tension between privatization and public records (in the shape of Tony Nixon). I'm curious if they were involved with this case, and if their positions have matured.
It's clear in context that they mean your background in computer security and political activism, I don't know where you are getting the idea that it's an comment on your ethnicity.
> at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
They de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance.
at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete
It's not a dataset of license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras. It's a dataset of license plate numbers that have been entered into search tools.
Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.
I commented before realizing that someone else already made the same point earlier, and you already explained that the law covers more than what you mentioned in your first comment.
I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
I'll assume you're correctly citing the statute — someone entering a sequence of characters in a "Search" field doesn't mean that the search term was "gathered by" or "created from the analysis of" ALPR data.
Put up billboards around metros with a license plate reader that queries this database with each passing car and announce "White Tesla Model Y XYZ-1234 You've been focked for: Inv"
Flock cameras are oriented to read rear plates. One would need a camera similarly configured + a billboard some distance in front, or perhaps 2 billboards, a 1-2 setup + payoff combo, the camera behind the first billboard, and the dynamic text on the second. Pulling up other public data correlated to the plate - where legal - may make a splash. I'm thinking addressing the car owner by their first name.
Right, but also remember that they're set up to analyze other vehicle traits, including but not limited to: color, make, model, body damage, panels that are a different color to the rest of the body, wheels, decals, bumper stickers, tow hitches, roof racks, etc., so even if they can't read your plate they can try to build a vehicle identity, and when they do get a plate capture, they can retroactively apply that to all other sightings of the vehicle.
"Flock Safety" is a company that makes "ALPR" cameras (automated license plate recognition, in reality they go far beyond just reading license plates), they've been getting a lot of attention recently because people are worried about privacy and abuse.
That website is a bit misleading, their "worldwide" map includes ALL ALPR cameras, not just the ones operated by Flock or for-profit surveillance companies.
The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.
Of course they are, that's how they track memberships, payment history, and that kind of stuff. Can't say I really care about a paid parking garage keeping a customer registry.
I trust the government a lot more than some random third party company ("flock"), though.
The point isn’t what is the company doing with the data but rather how secure are these IP cameras?
Some are for government spying while others are for government spying and other bad actors.
I’d love to gain access to said parking garage meter camera and scan plates too, only I’m looking for high value targets that just got to work and thus, left their home.
I’m looking at software used to capture, track, and pull data from all these sources in an attempt to build a dragnet like service where you can ask “where is license plate <bingo>”?
ANPR cameras which the rest of the world (and apparently America) have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
I think it's mostly just a privacy issue. The idea that your every movement is being recorded by the government is Orwellian, especially when they try to hide its existence, lie about its capabilities, and you have no say in the matter (referencing NSA metadata monitoring). The average person thinks their ring camera is like their coffee maker, an individual piece of technology they own and control. If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too.
But these cameras have been around for 30+ years, including in the US. Why is it suddenly in the news.
The cameras don't track me either. They track a car. They have no idea who is driving the car.
> If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too
That's the interesting bit, how did ANPR get into the US public consciousness now, rather than over a decade ago when it started to be used on toll roads
It’s trivial for law enforcement to track your movement with ALPR cameras. Information feeds into a single database, paid for by law enforcement agencies, and they just connect the dots.
Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.
Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.
Not yet. Facical recognition in 2025 is where LPR was in 2010.
As the cost of compute and wireless communications continues to drop, facial recognition will be prolific. There are more limitations with cameras, but AI will make it easy to backtrack movement to a place where they get a clean shot that can identify you.
As an example, the transit authority in NYC Metro was able to plug existing security feeds from trains into Amazon Rekognition to count heads, which feeds their ticketing app — you can see which carriages are full. As time goes on, they’ll become able to track the breadcrumbs individuals from seat to platform. (If not already)
Detectives do this manually today. I was on a jury where the purse snatcher was followed by various cameras until he got on a bus. They pulled the bus passes and tracked his pass back to his girlfriend.
It does. But more like “the black male with the red hoodie is here”
They don’t say “hibf just walked into the 7-11” yet. The Feds probably have a system that can do that for car passengers traveling on “drug corridors” (ie. I95) today.
Less popular because it’s not feasible for many. I live in MN. Biking 20mi to work when it’s -10F and in 6” of fresh snow on top of the 12” received so far this season just isn’t something that’s safe to do.
Please don’t make it seem like it’s a “popularity” thing; it’s a necessity thing.
Finland is a cold country with similar population count and larger area. For national domestic trips, 55% of people there use cars[1]. For MN i only found stats for MN metro area, but I’d expect public transport to be more developed there. The car usage is still 83%[2].
I bet the local community plows the roads but not the bike infrastructure, though? I get why, people probably drive more than bike.
But, in Canada, there are local communities that plow bike infrastructure and locals bike in their deep winter.
It's a chicken or egg problem of building infrastructure for users and users demanding infrastructure. It's not some fact of nature that it's impossible. Different communities have different priorities. So, necessity is a bit strong of a word.
Hardly anyone lives in MN - half the poulation of New York City alone.
The vast majority of Americans live in cities. Half live in just 8 metro-areas, just as the vast majority of Europeans live in cities. Europe is far more dispersed though.
First paragraph: reasonable, if ignoring that access it not likely to be unrestricted willy-nilly.
Second paragraph: not as reasonable given that Amazon likely comply without issue with us intelligence, and sell the data to third parties, which the police could just buy (similar has been done) to avoid consent or legal obstacles.
Third paragraph: out of nowhere, focus on police. No mention of intelligence agency staff or say Amazon staff doing the same thing.
Out of nowhere? The entire comment is talking about law enforcement (police) and law enforcement agencies (police departments) purchasing access to commercially owned surveillance databases. No warrant is required to use them, and in some cases that access is indeed "unrestricted willy-nilly."
Ah, you mean like if we had some sort of knowledgeable, impartial third-party to grant the police permissions. They could, get this, "judge" whether the absolute bare minimum of evidence is likely to exist. So long as Flock didn't provide a way to circumvent an approval process like that, you could maybe reduce the instances of abusers stalking their victims to "acceptable" levels.
What do you think the chances are that we could invent a system like that? You don't think Flock and the police would find a way to circumvent it do you?
> have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
That is one aspect.
But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?
Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.
Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".
And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.
They are being set up "for immigration purposes" but that's just a guise for a nation wide integrated system for cops and intel agencies to track every single American in every car down. They want keep an active, real time record of wherever we go and what patterns they exhibit for the algos to predict crime from anything they consider suspicious, possibly for future malicious purposes in a police state.
They’ve gotten cheaper and aggregated into nationwide networks. The older devices were expensive and in police car scenarios required pretty significant effort to install. The mobile flock just gets bolted to the dash.
In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.
Unless I'm missing something, Ring cameras film people at my doorstep and are for my personal use, so dont know how they're similar at all even if you don't trust Amazon
Ring cameras at your doorstep film me walking past the street. Just like your dashcam on your car films me in my car, or a number plate reader on my car films your car
Americans (the general public) are a lot more weary of government surveillance than other developed nations. Its one thing that you can get a lot of liberals and conservative to agree on.
Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.
People install ring cameras which record me walking past. Those cameras then push the data to private companies for processing, and are made available to police on a simple request.
ANPR has been a thing for 30 years. Is America just slow on the uptake? Even then it looks like they've been in use for a long time there.
>and are made available to police on a simple request.
That's a "santa claus for adults" rumor.
Ring only complies with requests that they are legally obligated to. Otherwise users need to voluntarily share the footage, which more often than not they do.
No, Workers free tier is 100,000 requests/day. Considering the error is on the main page, each visit is probably taking a minimum of 10+ requests, so it can easily be overwhelmed.
No, the paid plan scales to infinity (without having to beg for limit increases like on some other clouds). But ther paid plan has a $5/month base fee, so it's tempting to stay in the free plan if you don't expect to go viral
I love these kinds of sites, since they're indistinguishable from honeypots. Sure, have my license plate and the information that I'm worried about being watched.
> With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?
For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.
Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them.
This is intentionally not PII. You accept this burden when you decide to register a vehicle.
Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.
Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.
Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?
Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?
In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.
You can screech about "not a right" all you want but there's federal law (DDPA) that limits how easily states can reveal driver's PII. Usually a documented business purpose (i.e sending spam mail) is required.
This Michigan thing sounds like it walks right up to the line if not over it.
No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.)
In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
Pay a thousand bucks to a Montana agent to register you an pseudoanonymous LLC and put an old 90s Corolla into an LLC with a permanent registration plate (since anything 15+ years old can have a 'perm' plate on it.
While some people do get away with this, it carries some risk.
Without using an LLC, most every state requires you to register your vehicle where you live within 30-90 days with some exceptions (ie college students).
Even with the LLC, if you catch the attention of the state, I believe you might be risking being charged with tax evasion even if your goal was to protect your privacy. This is especially true if you can't prove the LLC to be a legitimate business venture.
Yeah, the Corolla won't be mistaken for a supercar, but many states have begun cracking down on residents with Montana plates such as Georgia, Ohio, and New York.
Also, insuring a car with out of state registration can be committing insurance fraud. Rates and fees are different between states due to different regulations. Further, depending on your policy, the insurer could deny claims because the car wasn't garaged in the state it was registered.
Really, if the privacy is of sufficient priority, the best solution is to just do things properly and move to rural Montana instead.
That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable.
You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL
Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.
The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.
I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.
If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.
There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.
Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.
Sure, and so what? You can look up people on Accurint without license plates. Depending on what kind of account you have, you can just search by a zip code, or a state with no further identifiers.
What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?
Theres a parking lot... what are the 10 wealthiest car owners...and the 10 frailest oldest people... or maybe the 20 women aged 19-25 blond under 150 pounds... and when do they get off work tired, drive home each day? What's the most isolated gas station,convenience store they stop at? Ones where few other cars pass by? Who's homes don't show a 2nd car in driveway? Owned by 6'5" 200 pound man? Who frequently visits a karate studio?
Or: im a car salesman, in comes a customer, whining abt lowering the price bc Theyre broke... lemme just look up where they eat supper every night! How much time they spend at airports! What school they drop off their kids! Who comes to their house? Nannies? Oh look drug dealers, i can threaten them with blackmail!
Sound ridiculous? All the data brings it into focus. A local detective told me theyre focusing on robberies of $ethnicity restaurants bc that group stockpiles cash in their homes...
And this is all assuming good info, but when u get creative:
..what if we look for mistakes... hey that annoying $religious neighbor pissed me off with his loud music. His kids car shows up as visiting thr wrong side of town..probably a wrong digit but lets report him anyway!!!
Or:
Hey lets scan all the wifi dbs for ssids that seem like defaults, then offer them csam-insurance: you pay me $1000 cash rn and ill insure i dont browse csam from your network! And my alpr data says when youre home and your iot devs tell me when you go to sleep so we'll slip it in at before-bed-wank-time!
Oh no, I can think very evil. I just don't see what kind of evil thinking would arrive at "Hey lets use this website to collect IP address/license plate pairs at a small scale"
That just doesn't strike me as a very efficient way of doing evil.
You can just go on accurint and find the oldest people living alone in the richest neighbourhoods near you. You can even fairly reliably find out whether or not they have living relatives.
All this deeply sensitive data is already readily available. I don't think IP+license plate data would be particularly interesting unless you're Google and able to gather that at an absolutely massive scale. But even then, you'd be using it for extremely boring kinds of evil.
"Wait, user compliance scan identified location traces associated with participitation in community groups prohibited by EasyLife Health™ policy update 2025-12-06b. Recommend to annul contract."
Wait really? I feel like this was happening in the 90s. Now every car has a full gps spy system integrated to the point I barely trust that my conversation is private in a modern vehicle. But I guess if you think it's just your car company, Android, Apple, roadside assistance, the local police, and probably the music you're playing that can pin your location you're probably ok.
Literally all of these can be avoided except the external apparati like the Flock cameras, which is why they're such a big deal.
Getting tracked by your map application or OS platform can be countered by using an open source ROM and a local map provider like OpenStreetMap. Gtting tracked by the car itself can oftentimes be prevented by unplugging the telematics unit (or its antennas) or bypassing it with special cables. But there's nothing you can legally do to protect against the Flock cameras, without ignoring the law entirely and going around town with an angle grinder.
LinkedIn has always struck me like a kind of contemporary slave management/market place, only one in which pick-mes try to be the best alpha slave they can be.
The fact that you are linked in, as in a chain, sure does not help with dispelling my impression.
In many states, car registration data is public information. If you have a license plate number, you can easily look up who the car is registered to, where they live, etc. License plate numbers are PII.
Thank you for the correction. This was absolutely true in my state, but your reply made me double-check the law. It has changed.
Now, the unredacted registration information is more limited. If you aren't in the (fairly broad) category of people who are entitled to the unredacted information, you can still get the records but the items legally defined as PII will be redacted.
Suppose the guy behind this website keeps a log of the requests, even accidentally, and eventually gets bought out by Flock themselves (websites critical of companies selling out is unfortunately common). Now Flock has a list of plates of people alert to flock and this gets added to your Palintir threat matrix, so the next time a cop pulls you over for some minor infraction his computer can prime him to be jumpy and trigger happy by labelling you as a potential dissident.
I totally understand your sentiment, but you could just check a random assortment of license plate numbers you collected while driving around, which also includes yours. At the very least that would effectively obfuscate your license plate sufficiently that it could not be attributed beyond other methods that likely already have done so.
Some are installed on private property, and supply data to the property owner. Some are installed on public property, and supply data to the government.
Hello, we at Flock are very sad to announce that your data was leaked, but due to the fact that we operate in a legal grey area to get around laws and are nothing more than the domestic surveillance equivalent to a PMC operating overseas, we invite you get fucked
Why would they break into individual hardware when they have unfettered access to the whole system in certain countries’ cases and can likely just hack into it in more adversarial cases? It is one of the several reasons why … yes, I know YC backed and funded Flock … the company and everyone in government that contracts for them to provide this mass surveillance service, is objectively and inherently treasonous. But don’t shoot the messenger just because people don’t like the message.
“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.
What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.
I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.
Why should I care if some low-ranking party official in China knows where I drive, when my actual government will use that data to deport me if I sufficiently piss it off?
Well, it's nice to know which cars are in the parking lot of a Booz-Allen office all day, and that there's one guy that on Thursday nights they drive to an Off Track Betting parlor for a couple of hours before driving back to their gated community and the cameras in that gated community show that the person has just one car. Let's set a honey trap for him next week at the OTB parlor and find out what he does and if he's of use.
That is oft-repeated, but case law is starting to show it's not strictly true:
See Mosaic + Carpenter case which say “Yes, each scan is public; yes, aggregation is different. "
Carpenter shows the Court recognizes that aggregated location data can be constitutionally significant.
Individual observability vs. systemic observation:
A passerby can note a single plate at a single place/time. But a system of ALPRs, distributed spatially and continuous in time, indexed and retained, can map a person’s entire movements, associations, repeated visits, and behavioral patterns. That’s exactly the “mosaic” insight: the whole reveals things the pieces don’t. (Maynard / Jones reasoning).
Now imagine every other aspect of modern life is enshittified similarly to some extent and all being dialed up. Nothing is sacred, and talk to the contrary is laughable. Government is a scummy grift, every big (money) cause is full of unaudited scammers. I hope you are never passionate about a pet government policy!
You can buy local or do it yourself, but all of those are squeezed at the margins by enshittified inputs.
Before even seeking to fix the problem, I try to work on me.
First, I try (difficult) to not be sucked into useless wallowing, which keeps me exactly where the enemy wants me to be. I tend to skim 'news' headlines now, if that.
Second, in my career I strive to produce uncommon quality so as to not add to the problem.
I love to stand out and feel proud of my work. It makes me sad when coworkers are concerned/confused when I put in extra effort. I know where they're coming from. No one notices nor cares at $megacorp, and my work is internal and humble.
I do it for self-improvement and to make the time I spend working for them worthwhile to me.
You make a great point! Setting a good example by being ambitious creates the Pygmalion Effect. The unavoidable contagion of repeated improvement making people hungry for more.
I also find everyone is hungry for kudos. I recommend being very liberal and publicly vocal with genuine kudos if you have them!
A met a guy once whom drives a PU truck, he lowers the tailgate and places an oversized piece of plywood in the bed as an excuse, he also places an opaque plastic cover over his front lic plate, which has been raised to a $300 fine in Texas, if caught. He now intends to place a series of bright strobe lights around his front plate to "bleach out" the sensors of these spy cameras.
Flock creates a dossier that allows an individual to be stalked and framed. This permits rouge users clamoring for more power to consolidate their toolkit and expedite their rise.
People get framed and stolen from all the time and this will certainly make it worse.
License plate numbers are old fashioned. Can't we get something more secure? E.g. plate numbers that change every hour would be a good start. I don't like to drive around with a giant cookie strapped to my car.
Cool website, gave it a go. I am not a general advocate of license plate tracking but believe it’s a double edge sword. A former vehicle was stolen and recovered twice - likely due to tracking technology.
Cars can have tracking devices installed that remain dormant until remotely activated by the owner in case of theft.
This is how Netstar and Tracker does it in South Africa. To massive success. So much so that a car without one of these installed is basically uninsurable.
I believe that the full weight of the nations resources should come into play whenever there are missing or abducted people.
CIA, NSA, satellites, all of it.
I can’t fathom while we don’t do that already. But absent of that, Flock is the next best thing. Mainly because it reduces the friction to get this information in the hands of local law-enforcement officers.
I have zero tolerance for crimes against children and fully support capital punishment for such.
The vast, vast majority of child abduction cases are either a domestic dispute between parents, or someone the child knows (also usually a family member). This scaremongering needs to stop, especially when it's used to justify the rapid erosion of our liberties at the hands of an authoritarian government.
You guys really need to come up with at least ONE other reason to push every single policy besides "think of the children"; Just one to break it up a bit.
Whenever anyone does a search in Flock's database, Flock sends the metadata to the related customers.
I.e., if someone does a statewide lookup in Nebraska, all Nebraska-based Flock customers receive the search metadata. Ostensibly, to be able to track if "their" ALPR data has been queried. Those audit logs are public record.
This is also how IL discovered out-of-state agencies were using data from Illinois for immigration enforcement (after FOIA by a citizen, of course; apparently none of the IL law enforcement agencies audited their data for unlawful activity).
It's a big deal even if it's been happening for a while. It should not be something we shrug our shoulders to and move on. These are stepping stones to a greater police state.
Oh no my super secret license plate!
definitely something that is normally hidden instead of being on the front and back of my car for anyone to see and photo.
Sure, but now there's a highly vulnerable network of cameras that reports wherever you pass to everyone way beyond the few people that saw you go around.
Oh no youre one druggie friend (that you didnt know about having a drug addiction) that visits you sometimes got caught by the cops. Oh no they think youre their drug dealer since his license plate got recognized in your driveway a few times. Oh no they are kicking your door in with a search warrant and shoot your dog.
Downvote all you want but adtechs like magnite, ttd, and applovin Have way more personal data on you and use it to influence. I'll take safety over ads any day of the week.
Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
Rule 1. Do not comply in advance. Do not accept it as inevitable. Do not give away your power without friction.
tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".
He also lives in a "nice" suburb of Chicago IIRC
I strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue.
And by "strongly suspect" I mean "know because I live in that kind of neighborhood in a different city in a different state".
> strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue
I live in Jackson Hole. None of my neighbours knew what these were. They’re getting taken out.
Don’t presume what folks are worried about without asking them.
It's genuinely funny how wrong you are about this, or about what my intersection with Flock is. Go on, keep extrapolating!
I’m pretty confused by the innuendo in the posters comment to even get what they are saying, but I can report from the south side of chicago that surveillance cameras are largely popular across demographics.
He's suggesting that Oak Park is supportive of Flock cameras because we're afraid of Black folks.
Not black, poor, perhaps "methy" even. Any crossover with black is purely coincidental.
I don't think you're racist in the slightest.
You don't know anything about me or about Oak Park. We killed our Flock contract. I did a good bit of the policy lifting to make that happen, including co-writing our initial pilot ALPR police General Order to lock them down and set up the transparency reporting that enabled us to make the case for killing them. But, keep going, I'm interested in what else you can confidently state about my work.
Speaking as a person of color, the government Oak Park prosecuted me for reasons of my blackness which is racist. The controversey that followed, if you ask me, is why the cameras got shot down. Transparency and not being big brother is just a convenient excuse to put a positive spin on it, as politicians do.
Knowing in extreme and annoying detail exactly the series of events that led us to kill our Flock contract, I do not believe this is at all true. I don't think trolling is a good plan here.
That's terrible! Nobody would ever say that out loud.
Yeah there's a bigger problem with the claim than that.
There is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers.
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
In New Hampshire, we banned both public and private ALPRs. You can see on the map that the only ones are at toll booths. Those got explicit exemptions in the law.
Isn't that the state with license plates that say "live free or die?" Unless, of course, you have a moral objection to that statement, cf. Wooley v. Maynard.
I'm sure that's their state license plate motto regardless of your moral objection
In Wooley v. Maynard SCOTUS held that NH could not require it's citizens to use a license plate displaying the state motto.
It's still their license plate motto and it's still not dependent on your moral objection
Do you see anyone claiming the opposite? The point is that they will not write the motto on your license plate if you object.
I get that HN attracts a certain amount of pedantry, but I can't figure out what exactly you're even trying to be pedantic about. There's not single comment here that could be reasonably interpreted as suggesting that "live free or die" isn't their motto
His pedantic point is that due to the way the original question was written, the answer is “yes” regardless if you object or not.
The question was “isn’t that the state with license plates that say ‘live free or die’?” And even if you get a license plate that doesn’t say it, NH is still the state with those plates
Free as in beer.
They're not that free about beer. Though, more free about beer than liquor. That's only allowed to be sold in state run liquor stores. It was a real head scratcher when I first encountered it.
Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
Yeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
Would they be subject to CCPA, then?
What's your point? To the extent they're a private company you're even less likely to get access to records from Flock ALPR cameras.
Just because the records created on behalf of the government are held by a private enterprise doesn't mean they aren't government records.
Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
Not automatically. There's aleeady case law(0x1) that ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records, even though the data are stored by Flock (a private vendor), not directly by the city.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
(0x1) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
Thanks for followup and link. Interesting.
IANAL: That court's decision was based on the contract w/ Flock. It does not move the needle wrt public records.
I may read the decision, testimony, and any amicus briefs. During the 00's, Wash Citizen's for Open Govt had a prominent blindspot wrt tension between privatization and public records (in the shape of Tony Nixon). I'm curious if they were involved with this case, and if their positions have matured.
Right, I agree. My point is that the FOIA laws of many states forbid disclosing the data this web page purports to surface.
[flagged]
Really? Me of all people? What about my Slovak ethnic identity do you think so attunes me to the concerns you're bringing?
It's clear in context that they mean your background in computer security and political activism, I don't know where you are getting the idea that it's an comment on your ethnicity.
The HN guidelines ask users to assume the most charitable interpretation/good faith. Even for "big name" accounts.
"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
Is the response I get for my good faith arguments. This is a forum run by tech oligarchs. Speech is being modified on here.
Try speaking ill of a big tech CEO with links to YC and you'll find out quickly that that's not "curious conversation" lmao
> at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
They're not a public body, that was my point
They de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance.
This feels a lot like "Yeah, but we'll do it anyways until a court makes us stop; because the profit is more than the fine"
but thry're not literally the government and the relevant laws only affect the literal government.
No, there is legal precedent that private companies who perform government services are subject to the same laws.
This is generally not the case.
Yeah, and Illinois law defines that as "ALPR data" and restricts its disclosure.
Sorry.
I commented before realizing that someone else already made the same point earlier, and you already explained that the law covers more than what you mentioned in your first comment.
You're right that the dataset is incomplete, but it contains searches done by police, not plates read by Flock.
The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.
I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
I'll assume you're correctly citing the statute — someone entering a sequence of characters in a "Search" field doesn't mean that the search term was "gathered by" or "created from the analysis of" ALPR data.
* While our most recent data is from 12/4/2025, there may be significant historical gaps.
* Most agencies don't proactively publish audit logs Records requests can take months or years to fulfill Some agencies heavily redact their logs
* We may not have requested logs from your local agencies yet
Put up billboards around metros with a license plate reader that queries this database with each passing car and announce "White Tesla Model Y XYZ-1234 You've been focked for: Inv"
What a sick society we live in.
This unfortunately wouldn't work quite as well in states where cars arent required to have a front facing license plate (like florida)
The camera could be separate from the billboard, and point at the backs of the cars. The billboard would be a short distance past that.
Flock cameras are oriented to read rear plates. One would need a camera similarly configured + a billboard some distance in front, or perhaps 2 billboards, a 1-2 setup + payoff combo, the camera behind the first billboard, and the dynamic text on the second. Pulling up other public data correlated to the plate - where legal - may make a splash. I'm thinking addressing the car owner by their first name.
Right, but also remember that they're set up to analyze other vehicle traits, including but not limited to: color, make, model, body damage, panels that are a different color to the rest of the body, wheels, decals, bumper stickers, tow hitches, roof racks, etc., so even if they can't read your plate they can try to build a vehicle identity, and when they do get a plate capture, they can retroactively apply that to all other sightings of the vehicle.
It really is fucking dystopian.
That'd be a great place to test one's plate for legibility to the toll and speed cameras.
How about we hold our leaders accountable?
Dystopian society.
Since the page is currently down and I have no idea what flocked means in the context of license plates, can I assume this is US specific?
"Flock Safety" is a company that makes "ALPR" cameras (automated license plate recognition, in reality they go far beyond just reading license plates), they've been getting a lot of attention recently because people are worried about privacy and abuse.
There's a bunch of articles about them here: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
I would also recommend Benn Jordan's YT channel, he has a couple of videos covering flock cameras. His latest one is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
edit: grammar
I love Benn Jordan. If you liked this one, go check out the one where he stores a JPEG inside of a living bird.
https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?si=K_TGBR6FNpjI0qFk
Unrelated but he's been getting threats of violence. I'm not sure whats going on with that.
https://deflock.me
That website is a bit misleading, their "worldwide" map includes ALL ALPR cameras, not just the ones operated by Flock or for-profit surveillance companies.
The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.
You assume those aren't logged and accessible by the government. They are.
Of course they are, that's how they track memberships, payment history, and that kind of stuff. Can't say I really care about a paid parking garage keeping a customer registry.
I trust the government a lot more than some random third party company ("flock"), though.
The point isn’t what is the company doing with the data but rather how secure are these IP cameras?
Some are for government spying while others are for government spying and other bad actors.
I’d love to gain access to said parking garage meter camera and scan plates too, only I’m looking for high value targets that just got to work and thus, left their home.
I’m looking at software used to capture, track, and pull data from all these sources in an attempt to build a dragnet like service where you can ask “where is license plate <bingo>”?
That seems contradictory. You don't care about a parking garage operator, but at the same time distrust "some random third party company"?
This is dystopian as fuck
Wait till you find out about your cell phone…
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ANPR cameras which the rest of the world (and apparently America) have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
I think it's mostly just a privacy issue. The idea that your every movement is being recorded by the government is Orwellian, especially when they try to hide its existence, lie about its capabilities, and you have no say in the matter (referencing NSA metadata monitoring). The average person thinks their ring camera is like their coffee maker, an individual piece of technology they own and control. If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too.
But these cameras have been around for 30+ years, including in the US. Why is it suddenly in the news.
The cameras don't track me either. They track a car. They have no idea who is driving the car.
> If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too
That's the interesting bit, how did ANPR get into the US public consciousness now, rather than over a decade ago when it started to be used on toll roads
Did you somehow miss the introduction of mobile phones? Came out of a coma recently?
Because people started caring about something, we're going to mock them because they don't care about something else too?
Let people slowly get interested in protecting their privacy; as they say, better late than never!
It’s trivial for law enforcement to track your movement with ALPR cameras. Information feeds into a single database, paid for by law enforcement agencies, and they just connect the dots.
Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.
Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.
All this is assuming one travels exclusively by car. Bikes, public transport, or walking are not as easy to track using this system.
Then again, these modes of transport are less popular in the US; I guess such a surveillance system is extra effective in the US because of that.
Not yet. Facical recognition in 2025 is where LPR was in 2010.
As the cost of compute and wireless communications continues to drop, facial recognition will be prolific. There are more limitations with cameras, but AI will make it easy to backtrack movement to a place where they get a clean shot that can identify you.
As an example, the transit authority in NYC Metro was able to plug existing security feeds from trains into Amazon Rekognition to count heads, which feeds their ticketing app — you can see which carriages are full. As time goes on, they’ll become able to track the breadcrumbs individuals from seat to platform. (If not already)
Detectives do this manually today. I was on a jury where the purse snatcher was followed by various cameras until he got on a bus. They pulled the bus passes and tracked his pass back to his girlfriend.
This automated already, and you don't need a face. Flock does it.
https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/reid
It does. But more like “the black male with the red hoodie is here”
They don’t say “hibf just walked into the 7-11” yet. The Feds probably have a system that can do that for car passengers traveling on “drug corridors” (ie. I95) today.
Less popular because it’s not feasible for many. I live in MN. Biking 20mi to work when it’s -10F and in 6” of fresh snow on top of the 12” received so far this season just isn’t something that’s safe to do.
Please don’t make it seem like it’s a “popularity” thing; it’s a necessity thing.
Finland is a cold country with similar population count and larger area. For national domestic trips, 55% of people there use cars[1]. For MN i only found stats for MN metro area, but I’d expect public transport to be more developed there. The car usage is still 83%[2].
[1]: https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/publicatio... page 6
[2]: https://metropolitan-council.github.io/TBI_Household_Synthes... “Driving remains the predominant mode of travel in the region, representing 83% of trips in 2023.”
I bet the local community plows the roads but not the bike infrastructure, though? I get why, people probably drive more than bike.
But, in Canada, there are local communities that plow bike infrastructure and locals bike in their deep winter.
It's a chicken or egg problem of building infrastructure for users and users demanding infrastructure. It's not some fact of nature that it's impossible. Different communities have different priorities. So, necessity is a bit strong of a word.
Hardly anyone lives in MN - half the poulation of New York City alone.
The vast majority of Americans live in cities. Half live in just 8 metro-areas, just as the vast majority of Europeans live in cities. Europe is far more dispersed though.
driving is also not feasible in those conditions. with the availability of remote work you should really stay home.
> public transport
Some European cities I remember having pervasive cameras in public transport a decade ago, ostensibly to prosecute vandals.
There was an article posted recently announcing that Flock reached an agreement with Amazon to ingest Ring cameras into their system.
Most ring users contribute their data and no warrant is required. If they don’t, the majority of people are cooperative.
Ring is problematic in some ways but doesn’t produce trivially searchable metadata.
This comment went right off a cliff at the end...
Why do you think so?
LOVEINT is indeed a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
I know it's a thing.
That was just my reaction reading the OP.
First paragraph: reasonable, if ignoring that access it not likely to be unrestricted willy-nilly.
Second paragraph: not as reasonable given that Amazon likely comply without issue with us intelligence, and sell the data to third parties, which the police could just buy (similar has been done) to avoid consent or legal obstacles.
Third paragraph: out of nowhere, focus on police. No mention of intelligence agency staff or say Amazon staff doing the same thing.
I just had a wee chuckle to myself was all.
Out of nowhere? The entire comment is talking about law enforcement (police) and law enforcement agencies (police departments) purchasing access to commercially owned surveillance databases. No warrant is required to use them, and in some cases that access is indeed "unrestricted willy-nilly."
Most people consider "intelligency agency" as part of the umbrella term "cops"
I think the logic totally follows, if your ex is a cop and you’re thinking of getting a Ring camera.
If a police officer potentially stalking his ex is the worst failure mode this guy can come up with, let's keep the Flock cameras.
With the right access controls and approval processes, that can be fully solved in a week.
Ah, you mean like if we had some sort of knowledgeable, impartial third-party to grant the police permissions. They could, get this, "judge" whether the absolute bare minimum of evidence is likely to exist. So long as Flock didn't provide a way to circumvent an approval process like that, you could maybe reduce the instances of abusers stalking their victims to "acceptable" levels.
What do you think the chances are that we could invent a system like that? You don't think Flock and the police would find a way to circumvent it do you?
> have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
That is one aspect.
But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?
Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.
Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".
And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.
They are being set up "for immigration purposes" but that's just a guise for a nation wide integrated system for cops and intel agencies to track every single American in every car down. They want keep an active, real time record of wherever we go and what patterns they exhibit for the algos to predict crime from anything they consider suspicious, possibly for future malicious purposes in a police state.
They’ve gotten cheaper and aggregated into nationwide networks. The older devices were expensive and in police car scenarios required pretty significant effort to install. The mobile flock just gets bolted to the dash.
In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.
Unless I'm missing something, Ring cameras film people at my doorstep and are for my personal use, so dont know how they're similar at all even if you don't trust Amazon
Ring cameras at your doorstep film me walking past the street. Just like your dashcam on your car films me in my car, or a number plate reader on my car films your car
Well, now Ring has partnered with Flock, so...
Americans (the general public) are a lot more weary of government surveillance than other developed nations. Its one thing that you can get a lot of liberals and conservative to agree on.
Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.
People install ring cameras which record me walking past. Those cameras then push the data to private companies for processing, and are made available to police on a simple request.
ANPR has been a thing for 30 years. Is America just slow on the uptake? Even then it looks like they've been in use for a long time there.
>and are made available to police on a simple request.
That's a "santa claus for adults" rumor.
Ring only complies with requests that they are legally obligated to. Otherwise users need to voluntarily share the footage, which more often than not they do.
I guess depends on your neighbours
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2945470/ring-lets-police-ask...
> You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.
> If you are owner of this website, prevent this from happening again by upgrading your plan on the Cloudflare Workers dashboard.
Cloudflare making sites unavailable?
No, Workers free tier is 100,000 requests/day. Considering the error is on the main page, each visit is probably taking a minimum of 10+ requests, so it can easily be overwhelmed.
This is genius if you work in B2C and want to prevent your website from going viral.
Does Cloudflare let you set hard limits when you are on a paid plan? Or they just do it for the free tier?
No, the paid plan scales to infinity (without having to beg for limit increases like on some other clouds). But ther paid plan has a $5/month base fee, so it's tempting to stay in the free plan if you don't expect to go viral
Have I been cloudflare'd?
I love these kinds of sites, since they're indistinguishable from honeypots. Sure, have my license plate and the information that I'm worried about being watched.
With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?
> With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?
For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.
Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them.
This is intentionally not PII. You accept this burden when you decide to register a vehicle.
Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.
Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.
Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?
Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?
In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.
PS Hello from Grand Rapids!
You can screech about "not a right" all you want but there's federal law (DDPA) that limits how easily states can reveal driver's PII. Usually a documented business purpose (i.e sending spam mail) is required.
This Michigan thing sounds like it walks right up to the line if not over it.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2721
> Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address)
If the car is leased, wouldn’t this just give leasing company details?
No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.)
In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
Ah thanks.
Permanent rental it is then. :)
Pay a thousand bucks to a Montana agent to register you an pseudoanonymous LLC and put an old 90s Corolla into an LLC with a permanent registration plate (since anything 15+ years old can have a 'perm' plate on it.
Then never think about it again.
While some people do get away with this, it carries some risk.
Without using an LLC, most every state requires you to register your vehicle where you live within 30-90 days with some exceptions (ie college students).
Even with the LLC, if you catch the attention of the state, I believe you might be risking being charged with tax evasion even if your goal was to protect your privacy. This is especially true if you can't prove the LLC to be a legitimate business venture.
Yeah, the Corolla won't be mistaken for a supercar, but many states have begun cracking down on residents with Montana plates such as Georgia, Ohio, and New York.
Also, insuring a car with out of state registration can be committing insurance fraud. Rates and fees are different between states due to different regulations. Further, depending on your policy, the insurer could deny claims because the car wasn't garaged in the state it was registered.
Really, if the privacy is of sufficient priority, the best solution is to just do things properly and move to rural Montana instead.
That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable.
You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL
Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.
The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
You just work backwards.
Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.
I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.
If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.
There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.
Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.
Sure, and so what? You can look up people on Accurint without license plates. Depending on what kind of account you have, you can just search by a zip code, or a state with no further identifiers.
What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?
You need to think more evil!
Lets brainstorm!
Theres a parking lot... what are the 10 wealthiest car owners...and the 10 frailest oldest people... or maybe the 20 women aged 19-25 blond under 150 pounds... and when do they get off work tired, drive home each day? What's the most isolated gas station,convenience store they stop at? Ones where few other cars pass by? Who's homes don't show a 2nd car in driveway? Owned by 6'5" 200 pound man? Who frequently visits a karate studio?
Or: im a car salesman, in comes a customer, whining abt lowering the price bc Theyre broke... lemme just look up where they eat supper every night! How much time they spend at airports! What school they drop off their kids! Who comes to their house? Nannies? Oh look drug dealers, i can threaten them with blackmail!
Sound ridiculous? All the data brings it into focus. A local detective told me theyre focusing on robberies of $ethnicity restaurants bc that group stockpiles cash in their homes...
And this is all assuming good info, but when u get creative:
..what if we look for mistakes... hey that annoying $religious neighbor pissed me off with his loud music. His kids car shows up as visiting thr wrong side of town..probably a wrong digit but lets report him anyway!!!
Or: Hey lets scan all the wifi dbs for ssids that seem like defaults, then offer them csam-insurance: you pay me $1000 cash rn and ill insure i dont browse csam from your network! And my alpr data says when youre home and your iot devs tell me when you go to sleep so we'll slip it in at before-bed-wank-time!
Oh no, I can think very evil. I just don't see what kind of evil thinking would arrive at "Hey lets use this website to collect IP address/license plate pairs at a small scale"
That just doesn't strike me as a very efficient way of doing evil.
You can just go on accurint and find the oldest people living alone in the richest neighbourhoods near you. You can even fairly reliably find out whether or not they have living relatives.
All this deeply sensitive data is already readily available. I don't think IP+license plate data would be particularly interesting unless you're Google and able to gather that at an absolutely massive scale. But even then, you'd be using it for extremely boring kinds of evil.
Pairing IPs to persons?
You can just get an API which does that and skip the middle steps?
Or even skip the API part and just buy that data in bulk. Or just collect it from a variety of freely leaked databases.
Most people park at their home and many drive to work. If you have both of those data points, you can identify people.
That's not very useful?
For homeowners, the real estate transactions are public and majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts.
So, from home and work, you identify me. Then you figure out which church I attend, and which strip club I attend.
"Wait, user compliance scan identified location traces associated with participitation in community groups prohibited by EasyLife Health™ policy update 2025-12-06b. Recommend to annul contract."
You're starting with the plate, getting the home, and then you can get the real estate info.
Most people don't expect their identity to be discoverable from their driving.
Isn't that the whole idea of licence plates? So you're identifiable?
To the police, perhaps. Not walmart.
Wait really? I feel like this was happening in the 90s. Now every car has a full gps spy system integrated to the point I barely trust that my conversation is private in a modern vehicle. But I guess if you think it's just your car company, Android, Apple, roadside assistance, the local police, and probably the music you're playing that can pin your location you're probably ok.
Literally all of these can be avoided except the external apparati like the Flock cameras, which is why they're such a big deal.
Getting tracked by your map application or OS platform can be countered by using an open source ROM and a local map provider like OpenStreetMap. Gtting tracked by the car itself can oftentimes be prevented by unplugging the telematics unit (or its antennas) or bypassing it with special cables. But there's nothing you can legally do to protect against the Flock cameras, without ignoring the law entirely and going around town with an angle grinder.
> majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts.
What a time to live in!
LinkedIn has always struck me like a kind of contemporary slave management/market place, only one in which pick-mes try to be the best alpha slave they can be.
The fact that you are linked in, as in a chain, sure does not help with dispelling my impression.
In many states, car registration data is public information. If you have a license plate number, you can easily look up who the car is registered to, where they live, etc. License plate numbers are PII.
This is simply not true.
Thank you for the correction. This was absolutely true in my state, but your reply made me double-check the law. It has changed.
Now, the unredacted registration information is more limited. If you aren't in the (fairly broad) category of people who are entitled to the unredacted information, you can still get the records but the items legally defined as PII will be redacted.
That still makes the license plate PII, though.
Suppose the guy behind this website keeps a log of the requests, even accidentally, and eventually gets bought out by Flock themselves (websites critical of companies selling out is unfortunately common). Now Flock has a list of plates of people alert to flock and this gets added to your Palintir threat matrix, so the next time a cop pulls you over for some minor infraction his computer can prime him to be jumpy and trigger happy by labelling you as a potential dissident.
Exactly - you can collect license plates numbers way easier than this. The best data they can really get is a connection to an IP address.
Sell it to the cops and/or ICE as belonging to "self-identified persons of interest."
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Flag you as being worth watching, or up your composite score by a point or whatever.
Checksum?
I totally understand your sentiment, but you could just check a random assortment of license plate numbers you collected while driving around, which also includes yours. At the very least that would effectively obfuscate your license plate sufficiently that it could not be attributed beyond other methods that likely already have done so.
They list their sources, if you care but don't trust them you could replicate it on your own.
Reminds me of the (legit) form to claim compensation for a privacy leak.
Put in your name, address, phone number, dob, ssn and bank details - we will post you a cheque for $2.50
100% always feels like a trap.
Who isn't worried about being watched? I am certainly not confident the government can tell their ass from their face, so anyone could be suspect.
Lmao I got honeypotted in h.s. by one of those 'does your crush like you' astrology sites
Sounds like social media ;-)
Lol I actually tried it with my plate, i hope i don't get SWATed
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Very problematic flock security video - how easy is to hack them https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?si=vC2Kyl_e30kVVmXT
Visit deflock.me/map to see if you live near a camera.
https://deflock.me/map
Holy shit! I had no idea they were everywhere!
Do they get permission or permit to install them?
Some are installed on private property, and supply data to the property owner. Some are installed on public property, and supply data to the government.
Can’t wait for the Flock Equifax/SouthParkWereSorry-esque breach announcement any day. I should start a betting pool w my friends.
Hello, we at Flock are very sad to announce that your data was leaked, but due to the fact that we operate in a legal grey area to get around laws and are nothing more than the domestic surveillance equivalent to a PMC operating overseas, we invite you get fucked
No worries; after Flock gets breached, you'll be compensated with one free year of their services.
I've got $10 on compromised six months before they had their first customer.
If YouTube personalities can break into the hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if foreign intelligence has already figured out a way. Clownin
Why would they break into individual hardware when they have unfettered access to the whole system in certain countries’ cases and can likely just hack into it in more adversarial cases? It is one of the several reasons why … yes, I know YC backed and funded Flock … the company and everyone in government that contracts for them to provide this mass surveillance service, is objectively and inherently treasonous. But don’t shoot the messenger just because people don’t like the message.
“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.
What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.
I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.
Why should I care if some low-ranking party official in China knows where I drive, when my actual government will use that data to deport me if I sufficiently piss it off?
Well, it's nice to know which cars are in the parking lot of a Booz-Allen office all day, and that there's one guy that on Thursday nights they drive to an Off Track Betting parlor for a couple of hours before driving back to their gated community and the cameras in that gated community show that the person has just one car. Let's set a honey trap for him next week at the OTB parlor and find out what he does and if he's of use.
My breach compensation will be my choice of 3 Flock Cameras from any location in the US with a pole saw.
Slashdotted within 3 hours.
Now there's a term I haven't heard in a while
Yup.
Nowadays, we say “hugged to death.”
Hacker-Noosed
Cloudflared. Although I guess that's ambiguous, lately.
Have I ran out of 100,000 requests?
Does your significant other know about your car collection? You may have a car hoarding problem.
I wonder if I got a license plate holder that said 'I do not consent to selling my position information' if I could sue them.
You have no right to privacy in public, at least in the US.
That is oft-repeated, but case law is starting to show it's not strictly true:
See Mosaic + Carpenter case which say “Yes, each scan is public; yes, aggregation is different. "
Carpenter shows the Court recognizes that aggregated location data can be constitutionally significant.
Individual observability vs. systemic observation: A passerby can note a single plate at a single place/time. But a system of ALPRs, distributed spatially and continuous in time, indexed and retained, can map a person’s entire movements, associations, repeated visits, and behavioral patterns. That’s exactly the “mosaic” insight: the whole reveals things the pieces don’t. (Maynard / Jones reasoning).
clarity is good. i believe that was a reference to the futility of posting "i do not consent" messages on social media.
But don’t I have a right to not get stalked?
Yes of course you do. If you're being stalked, contact your local police department.
Interesting I can’t access this over VPN
Well, yeah. Clownflare
Now imagine every other aspect of modern life is enshittified similarly to some extent and all being dialed up. Nothing is sacred, and talk to the contrary is laughable. Government is a scummy grift, every big (money) cause is full of unaudited scammers. I hope you are never passionate about a pet government policy!
You can buy local or do it yourself, but all of those are squeezed at the margins by enshittified inputs.
Before even seeking to fix the problem, I try to work on me.
First, I try (difficult) to not be sucked into useless wallowing, which keeps me exactly where the enemy wants me to be. I tend to skim 'news' headlines now, if that.
Second, in my career I strive to produce uncommon quality so as to not add to the problem.
I love to stand out and feel proud of my work. It makes me sad when coworkers are concerned/confused when I put in extra effort. I know where they're coming from. No one notices nor cares at $megacorp, and my work is internal and humble.
I do it for self-improvement and to make the time I spend working for them worthwhile to me.
You forgot to mention personal integrity and setting a good example to others.
You make a great point! Setting a good example by being ambitious creates the Pygmalion Effect. The unavoidable contagion of repeated improvement making people hungry for more.
I also find everyone is hungry for kudos. I recommend being very liberal and publicly vocal with genuine kudos if you have them!
A met a guy once whom drives a PU truck, he lowers the tailgate and places an oversized piece of plywood in the bed as an excuse, he also places an opaque plastic cover over his front lic plate, which has been raised to a $300 fine in Texas, if caught. He now intends to place a series of bright strobe lights around his front plate to "bleach out" the sensors of these spy cameras.
> He now intends to place a series of bright strobe lights around his front plate to "bleach out" the sensors of these spy cameras.
Isn't this a safety hazard?
Is his name Rusty Shackelford by any chance?
Does he drive a hotdog shaped car?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLfAf8oHrMo
How does he plan to trigger the strobe lights?
Flock creates a dossier that allows an individual to be stalked and framed. This permits rouge users clamoring for more power to consolidate their toolkit and expedite their rise.
People get framed and stolen from all the time and this will certainly make it worse.
Are you talking about the linked website or Flock itself?
fixed
License plate numbers are old fashioned. Can't we get something more secure? E.g. plate numbers that change every hour would be a good start. I don't like to drive around with a giant cookie strapped to my car.
Great, more expensive electronic crap in/on the car to break...
You can say the same about a line of code.
The whole point of plastering a giant UID on your vehicle is so that it can be identified. Security isn't the purpose here.
But the point is that security _can_ be addressed, while still allowing the vehicle to be identified.
You can search with „OUTATIME“. For any non-americans lurking in the comments.
Cool website, gave it a go. I am not a general advocate of license plate tracking but believe it’s a double edge sword. A former vehicle was stolen and recovered twice - likely due to tracking technology.
Cars can have tracking devices installed that remain dormant until remotely activated by the owner in case of theft.
This is how Netstar and Tracker does it in South Africa. To massive success. So much so that a car without one of these installed is basically uninsurable.
There is no need for external 3rd party tracking.
Seems like the website has ran out of cloudflare worker credits on their plan:
I believe that the full weight of the nations resources should come into play whenever there are missing or abducted people. CIA, NSA, satellites, all of it. I can’t fathom while we don’t do that already. But absent of that, Flock is the next best thing. Mainly because it reduces the friction to get this information in the hands of local law-enforcement officers. I have zero tolerance for crimes against children and fully support capital punishment for such.
The vast, vast majority of child abduction cases are either a domestic dispute between parents, or someone the child knows (also usually a family member). This scaremongering needs to stop, especially when it's used to justify the rapid erosion of our liberties at the hands of an authoritarian government.
You guys really need to come up with at least ONE other reason to push every single policy besides "think of the children"; Just one to break it up a bit.
Well, let me ask you this. What is your expectation from society if you or your family is personally affected?
I expect society to not track and extraordinarily rendition citizens and legal residents under the guise of "think of the children", for one.
But think of the children!!?
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I’m curious; what database are they using? Or does Flock allow queries to their database?
Whenever anyone does a search in Flock's database, Flock sends the metadata to the related customers.
I.e., if someone does a statewide lookup in Nebraska, all Nebraska-based Flock customers receive the search metadata. Ostensibly, to be able to track if "their" ALPR data has been queried. Those audit logs are public record.
This is also how IL discovered out-of-state agencies were using data from Illinois for immigration enforcement (after FOIA by a citizen, of course; apparently none of the IL law enforcement agencies audited their data for unlawful activity).
FOIA the records
Have I been HNed? [Yes] No
I mean, we already had PRISM, why is anyone acting like this is a big deal?
It's a big deal even if it's been happening for a while. It should not be something we shrug our shoulders to and move on. These are stepping stones to a greater police state.
There can be multiple big deals at once.
Because prism is a big deal too.
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just enter 10 license numbers.
Have I been flocculated? Check your social security number to see whether you are considered pond scum.
Oh no my super secret license plate! definitely something that is normally hidden instead of being on the front and back of my car for anyone to see and photo.
Sure, but now there's a highly vulnerable network of cameras that reports wherever you pass to everyone way beyond the few people that saw you go around.
Okay? so what. People can see that I drive? do you not think that verizon/ att /google cant see where you traveling by the phone you carry?
"Oh no, my super secret movement data, which is now being made available to a large number of people" would be more accurate.
Oh no lots people can now see that I go to costco and publix.
Oh no youre one druggie friend (that you didnt know about having a drug addiction) that visits you sometimes got caught by the cops. Oh no they think youre their drug dealer since his license plate got recognized in your driveway a few times. Oh no they are kicking your door in with a search warrant and shoot your dog.
Don't need Flock to have that happen - https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-hears-case-fam...
Cool, so now there are multiple ways to have it happen.
That sounds worse.
Oh no, my bad faith argument!
Downvote all you want but adtechs like magnite, ttd, and applovin Have way more personal data on you and use it to influence. I'll take safety over ads any day of the week.
It's not one or the other. Everyone should be opposed to both.
Psst, hey, we hate all of those, too. Hating one shitty surveillance-state service doesn't preclude hating other shitty surveillance-state services.