Discussion

snailmailman: This is a quite scary map. They are all over my local area. It may technically be possible to route a drive around them, but if you take the most convenient path between any two points at least one camera will spot you. I'd have to leave my neighborhood through back roads and enter local shopping areas through sidestreets.This data shouldn't even be collected in the first place, let alone consolidated into a national network that any police officer can decide to spy on me through.

CGMthrowaway: > It may technically be possible to route a drive around themThat's an interesting idea...

cdrnsf: Remember, according to Flock's CEO, Deflock is a terrorist organization.

runjake: Great site.Caveat: it does not seem to update camera statuses after initial reporting. I see several cameras that were removed long ago, or have been repositioned, but their old statuses remain.

CGMthrowaway: DeFlock is powered by crowdsourced data from the OpenStreetMap community. The map is incomplete! New locations are always being added. Know of a missing ALPR? Contribute to the map: https://deflock.org/report/id

bigwheels: When your car gets stolen, suddenly nobody can access the data.Are there any coordinated efforts for widespread scrubbing or removal of these parasitic devices?

dylan604: When your gets stolen, even with camera data, the police will not do anything.

glitcher: In my area I'm seeing a few random ones on roadways, but mostly clusters of them in the parking lots of Home Depots, Lowes, and Wal-Marts.

drunken_thor: Haha Sudbury and Napanee are the only places in Canada to have them. They are tiny cities where nothing happens. Bored police officers imagining situations where they are needed.

cm2012: What I am seeing is room for a lot more in my local neighborhood. Barely any coverage.

pwg: If you know where some of them are, you can add the data yourself: https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance

cm2012: I'm not saying the map is missing cameras, I am saying I would personally like to see more in my neighborhood (for crime reduction reasons).

mikece: Yes, and according to Steve Ballmer (back in the day) Linux Torvalds was a terrorist. People are allowed to say stupid things.

jLaForest: People are allowed to say stupid things....and those people should be held accountable for the stupid things they say

iamtheworstdev: wow. quite literally the only ones in my area are surveilling the county park / community center. that's creepy. I'll just have to assume they're doing something creepier at the public library.

ssl-3: Can you elaborate upon the kinds of crime reduction that these systems provide?

whimsicalism: Much prefer camera driven enforcement to cop-on-beat driven enforcement.

burningChrome: >> This is a quite scary map.It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.

ghouse: But the cameras that the law enforcement officers canvas in the area aren't centrally aggregated and tagged with meta data such that they can be queried at scale.

LordGrey: Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.[0] https://www.ketk.com/news/crime-public-safety/new-traffic-ca...[1] https://www.beltontexas.gov/news_detail_T11_R1277.php

qup: The odds are 100% that it will be abused.

craftkiller: Huh, none on the upper west side in NYC. Interesting.

technol0gic: by "say stupid things," you of course mean "tell bald-faced lies"

bob1029: The only flock cameras indicated in my town are the canonical Home Depot arrangement. I'm pretty sure it's part of their standard operating procedures at this point. The effect these have had on the in store experience (at my location) is the primary thing that has me interested in limited deployments. Shopping at HD prior to the ALPRs was a horrible time. I think they finally caught the guy who was stealing the little screws out of the irrigation vacuum breakers. You can actually get a complete, unopened factory product most of the time now.

segmondy: Interesting ... the police in this case are claiming to be the owners of the camera.https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...

hsuduebc2: Everyone who is not content with the way I do business must be a terrorist for sure. o_o

hsuduebc2: Lol, sure it is. Ridiculous.

Firerouge: Do you have a source to your Bryan claim?If you look at the map, there are zero flock cameras reported in that region.None in Moscow Idaho where the murder happened, none in Pullman where he lived, and none showed between the locations.

zythyx: There's a disclaimer when you first open the page that the map is incomplete and that users need to submit the data. It's possible that data hasn't been submitted/parsed yet

ImPostingOnHN: There have been numerous instances where cops used it to stalk exes, etc. If it isn't already, it will be used to stalk a blacklist of dissidents. It will continue to happen as long as the system exists.

birdo-wordo: All tools and systems can be abused. Eg: Anonymous tip lines are abused and cause Swatting.Law enforcement needs reform for sure but I just don't understand the hate against these plate capture cams specifically.

unclad5968: Weird. The city I live in has cameras, but only a few at random intersections. Most of the cameras are on a university campus, home depot, Lowes, and target. Are these normal places to put flock cameras for other cities?

tmshapland: How do we make this site mainstream? The public would really start to push back if they could so viscerally experience that they are being surveilled multiple times per day.

seniorThrowaway: I think you overestimate the public.

birdo-wordo: The community around deflock promotes and condones theft and vandalism on these devices.The T word is out of line, but I think that's the spirit of what he meant.

array_key_first: A more generous term is civil disobedience. I think the argument is the original theft was using tax payers dollars on fancy tracking devices in the first place.

birdo-wordo: It's not civil if it's law breaking.

array_key_first: That's literally exactly what civil disobedience is.

david_shaw: It would be an interesting and potentially useful project to combine these camera locations with Maps routing -- similar to "avoid toll roads," we could "avoid surveillance cameras."

danny_codes: Enforcement is one way to reduce crime. Another way is to reduce poverty. Which will we choose? One road leads to South Africa. The other, Denmark.

array_key_first: These cameras aren't even enforcement, just surveillance.I think we all know even with the best technology in the world the police aren't gonna get off their lazy asses if your car gets stolen. This is just a way to burn money.

slg: Just anecdotally looking around my city, it's noticeable that the camera's locations have a much stronger correlation with areas of high wealth rather than high crime.

nomel: Generally, only addicts steal from poorer people.And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.

downrightmike: wage theft is a much larger crime

xXSLAYERXx: > However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stopAt what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.

mulmen: [delayed]

debarshri: Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.I think reducing crime and road safety is an excuse.There are true innovators in the traffic camera space but i think counties often choose vendors who give them best ROI.

carefulfungi: You should assume every police cruiser has a plate reader, too.

tonymet: I volunteer for my city & county , and I'm a privacy advocate, so I have an ambivalent opinion on Flock cameras. Given the completely untenable demands on law enforcement, and extreme driver recklessness , the only practical way to enforce law and order with drivers is some sort of automated surveillance.Since covid, driver recklessness has been out of control. Running reds, extreme speed, escaping police are all common. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths remain extreme. At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law.Imagine you are a policy maker, with worse driver behavior, and police force that are less able to enforce the law. What tools would you use to maintain law and order?If you don't want surveillance, you will have to make some other tradeoffs to allow human beings to better monitor the public and enforce the law. They are not omnipotent and omniscient creatures.

boelboel: Police just aren't doing their job in the US, who even knows what they're doing at this point. Basically no country had the post-covid driver issue as much as America. Some states basically halved fines lol, make them do their jobs.

dawnerd: Seriously. People run reds in front of cops and they do nothing. I was tboned and the person that hit me had no license or anything to identify and ran a red and still was let go without anything.

doctor_radium: Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.

dawnerd: I contacted them about it too and got the most generic corpo pr about them being essential for the safety of their employees.

andoando: Why dont they put up a couple drones up high in the sky

birdo-wordo: No that's uncivil disobedience. The difference is inaction vs action.

pietervdvn: If you spot missing camera's - Flock or not - you can add them to OSM easily with https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance

culi: Everydoor's UI is also quite nice for this. it even lets you enter in the orientation quite easilyhttps://every-door.app/https://github.com/Zverik/every_door

burkaman: I don't think this is true, I can't even find anyone else claiming this happened.

dspillett: I don't remember him calling Linus a terrorist, though there were others that associated anything with a copyleft licence to be the loony left (or the commie left).He certainly referred to both him and Linux as cancers though, that I do remember. He later changed his mind on that, and IIRC may even have publicly apologised for those statements.

buellerbueller: All this does is incentivize crime doers to steal someone else's license plate first.

fc417fc802: I'm glad the data is being catalogued and made available like this but the interactive map doesn't work for me at all. Seems to be missing clickable zoom controls and gestures on my trackpad only seem to be able to get it to zoom out, not in (I think maybe it's becoming entirely unresponsive when it first registers the zoom in event and dropping the rest of it). Did anyone actually bother to test this on a low end device?More generally, if you're a webdev with a high end workstation it's really important to occasionally spin up a single core VM with less than 4 GB RAM, open a youtube video, and then check how well your page works in a second simultaneously visible window.

nocoolnametom: One way to possibly get the cameras taken down: insist on requesting the data as it's public data and should be publicly accessible.https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/wa-cit...

the_real_cher: You can bet money theyre selling this data to private companies like repo men.

burkaman: He said Linux is a cancer, which was a stupid thing to say, but not the same as calling Linus a cancer. I say plenty of bad things about software that I would not say about the people who create it. I think Next.js is awful to use but that doesn't mean I think everyone at Vercel is an awful person, for example.

pibaker: > Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.

fc417fc802: > the (real) purpose of a system is what it doesI agree with the rest of what you wrote but the quote is an overly cynical tired cliche when applied in a blanket manner. There are specific situations involving bad faith actors where it is directly relevant, and there are also times where it can be a useful observation about the impact of perverse incentives that build on top of unintended consequences.But the way you're using it there it's no better than other politically charged nonsensical slogans.

culi: Because they already are

k33n: Can you name just one incident of abuse?

randlet: Sudbury is 150k+ people so not exactly tiny in terms of Canadian cities (30th most populus).

k33n: Why are you guys acting like you’re being investigated by the Feds? What possible problem could flock cameras actually cause you?

9999px: We are all being investigated by the Feds 24/7 — that's what dragnet surveillance is: indiscriminate investigation at scale to be used retroactively."Don't do anything bad and nothing will happen" is frankly asinine to me, personally. That same logic could extend to stop-and-frisk or random door-to-door visits to check for citizenship.

ribosometronome: If they're not already exempted by law, legislators are likely to carve out exemptions. Federally, the FOIA already exempts the government from releasing data that would violate privacy (which was one of the hurdles to releasing Epstein related documents prior to Congress passing a law to demand it).

barnas2: Isn't the entire argument for these based on the fact that people don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place? Not that I'm sure they won't try to make an excuse as to why it's different, but as far as I'm aware, you're allowed to just film in public.

milkytron: Nice. The bike trail to my office and a few grocery stores doesn't have any of these.

Zigurd: Before posting that you couldn't Google the Milwaukee cop who got busted for abusing Flock camera access? From just a week ago?If you want an absolute torrent of abuse search for cops running the IDs of their exes. That's why it's dead certain that Flock cameras will be routinely abused.

k33n: So then we need better access controls, and apparently the people who abuse it to stalk exes and such are already being prosecuted.Doesn’t seem like the technology itself is the core issue here to me.

pc86: The only way you could have moved this goal post faster is if you had edited your original comment.

milkytron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

HNisCIS: Uh speak for yourself but some of us are doing the good crimes and would rather like to continue that fight from outside prison and without being shot in the face.

mainmailman: Why do anything at all?

pc86: They do, especially in cities and wealthy suburbs (and honestly a lot of poor rural areas too).The difference is these typically don't zap that data up to a central database that any agency in the country can access, the way Flock does if only because the security people at Flock are a joke.

stri8ted: It's clearly true there have been abuses as a result of this technology. And its also clearly true criminals have been caught as a result of the cams, that otherwise would not have been.If you believe the costs of the the abuses, and potential abuses, exceed the benefit, then at least be honest about the trade-off, because there are real benefits.Personally, I believe the costs, on net, are worth the benefits. And in so far as the costs can be further reduced, without loosing most benefits, then great. This is not right or wrong. It's just a question of values, and how you weight the costs vs benefits.Don't down-vote this all at once.

Forgeties79: My question to you is: how are you assessing the costs? Do you know how many crimes have been stopped as a result of these cams? Do you know the extent to which our privacy is being lost and our data is being used against us or others?

mixmastamyk: Wondering what the intersection is with Home Depot cameras and ICE?

lokar: Police in the US very rarely face accountability for misconduct.

pilingual: https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/camden-nj-homicide...

superkuh: Flock AI cameras run off small solar panels. Having run my own computer systems off small solar panels I know that even a minor shadow or a bit of bird poop on the panel can decrease the output enough the computer eventually cannot run and shuts down. I bet Flock cameras have the same response to a bit of bird poop like substance or shadow.

kurtoid: Lowe's has their own contract with Flock. I've seen them outside a couple of Targets too

stri8ted: I take into account publicly available information (news articles), factor in personal anecdotes, and reason about human nature and incentives. I know the extent of reported abuses, and I do my best to extrapolate. It's not perfect, but such is life.To be clear, even if we all agreed on the data, I still would not expect everyone to take the same position. There are subjective differences in values.

ergocoder: I'm gonna get downvoted for this.But I'd like cameras in my neighborhood.

owlninja: I added one a few months ago and went to go check it, and there are 2 others almost right on top of it pointing in different directions, I guess that can't be prevented? I'm fairly certain they didn't add two more ALPRs that close to each other.

pilingual: Some intersections have 4 or more cameras.

sciencejerk: I personally know 3 victims of brutally violent crime. Flock would have detected, but maybe not prevented, two of these cases, where violence occurred in broad, open daylight near main roads and highways. Crimes occurred in left-leaning, anti-police small midwest city. All of the victims were women.I would encourage anti-Flockers and anti-authority individuals out here to question their motives and make sure that their voices and actions are best aligned with protecting vulnerable individuals (this also includes trafficked illegal immigrants).Seems like many folks here might be more concerned with preventing hypothetical/theoretical harm, instead of REAL harm (violent crime, trafficking, vehicle theft)

jorts: My vehicle was stolen in an area with Flock cams. It did not help at all.

fc417fc802: It only gets them deactivated until the state legislature "fixes" the "loophole".

pc86: Does that mean it shouldn't be done?

fc417fc802: By all means go for it. It's just important to be aware that it's (most likely) a temporary stopgap as opposed to an actual solution to the problem.

xXSLAYERXx: Why even deploy such systems? I would support less for sure.

gentile: Download osm data, extract roads and surveillance, gpd overlay how=difference, remove/edit the different osmid's, write to pbf file, convert to obf file w/ osmandmapcreator, import into OsmAnd.Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs on your phone.Edit: link https://github.com/pickpj/Big-B-Router - I tend to find ALPRs that are missing in the OSM data, so keep on updating OSM data.

ssl-3: > Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs [that we -- regular people -- know about] on your phone [while still being observed by the ones we don't know about].fixed that for you. :-/

jacquesm: And a good chunk of your trips will have to be cancelled because no such route exists.

pugworthy: If you're in the US, stay away from Home Depot and Lowe's if you want to not be around them. It's not universal, but it's surprising how much they are often there.I get it may have its application in theft recovery, but it also happens to have some strong potential for ICE raids for day laborers. I don't think it has much application to theft prevention as I doubt many people even know they are there.

asveikau: > Flock would have detected, but maybe not prevented, two of these casesI'm glad you acknowledge this, because it highlights what has irritated me about the discussion of crime in the last ~6 years. People seem to expect that crime can be prevented. Our criminal justice system and system of civil rights can only intervene after the crime has occurred, which means it won't prevent anything. Maybe I've misread you personally, and I don't mean to put it all on you, but I think people with your position tend to vastly overstate the deterrent factor of proposed interventions.Further, only reacting to crime and not seeking to "punish" people before a crime has occurred is exactly how our system should work. When reasoning about crime prevention, a large number of people seem to want police to intervene preemptively. Or they want to punish offenders out of proportion to actual crimes, to prevent recidivism that hasn't happened yet. This type of thinking seems to slide pretty quickly into the "pre-crime" concept of dystopian scifi. We called that stuff dystopian for a reason.In my opinion what we should do instead to prevent crime is to promote social cohesion, in the form of preventing income and wealth disparity, funding a strong social safety net, help for drug addicts and the mentally ill, etc. People who live happier, more stable lives will have less reason to turn to crime.(I will also note, crime is lower everywhere in America vs. a few decades ago. Violent crime peaked in the mid 1990s. So it is in some sense a misguided endeavor completely, focusing on problems that are relatively unlikely.)

xXSLAYERXx: There must be some level of acceptable failure.

Zigurd: So you think you can solve police accountability and keep the cameras? I admire that level of ambition. Have you got the Nobel prize nominations lined up already?

rc5150: This is not an issue of being filmed in public, this is an issue of not having the choice to opt in or out of the aggregated data harvesting performed by unregulated AI models owned by unregulated for-profit corporations that have no legislative oversight or safeguards.If a human followed me around in public recording me, went through every frame and highlighted my face, my car, my license plate, dents and scratches that identify my car, where I'm going, what I'm doing, cross referencing that to other public information to build a dossier, I would have a solid case of harassment against that person.

jmward01: So, our city clearly has other cameras but they are from a different vendor (and don't show up on the map). I wonder how good/bad the other players in the industry are. Flock gets the press, is that just letting someone worse quietly fill in the gaps?

tadfisher: They are just as bad, and much better at lobbying and PR.They might also be competent at securing access to the data, removing an obvious objection to continued relationships with Flock.

mbrameld: It sounds like your point is that people should be willing to give up their privacy in return for the chance of detecting (not preventing) violent crimes.I think it's also disingenuous (or at best, completely naive) to pretend like harm from Flock and other surveillance is hypothetical/theoretical. Here are just 2 recent examples of REAL harm:https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/crime/2026/01/12/men...https://kenoshacountyeye.com/2025/12/12/deputy-on-leave-accu...You can guarantee that there are many more that haven't been caught.

cm2012: It has to be paired with vigorous plate fraud enforcement imo

qubidt: This implies that the harm caused by this broad surveillance technology is "hypothetical/theoretical", when there is long history in this country's government using private companies to launder otherwise illegal surveillance of political activists[1].And even if you ignore the historical parallels, there are already cases of: officers using Flock systems to stalk dating partners[2][3], immigration enforcement using Flock data to track targets[4], and ICE/CBP bypassing the systems in place that let local jurisdictions choose not to share with federal agencies[5].[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Goals_Foundation[2]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/01/12/menasha...[3]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/02/24/mpd-off...[4]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...[5]: https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...

thephyber: No they don’t. You are conflating “any” with “every”.In my city, the plate reader cop cars have 4 smallish boxes, each mounted above a quarter panel. At most about 1/20 of the police cars for my local PD has these installed.It’s more likely that private sector cars have them installed because car repo companies will pay bounties for license plate hits on a car they have an active repo contract for.

pseudalopex: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1][1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Forgeties79: I get that but at the very least one should demand evidence to their efficacy

stri8ted: Flock has put out a report claiming 10% crime in the US is solved using their technology. There are of course counter argument, that claim this is not valid.https://www.flocksafety.com/customers/how-many-crimes-do-aut...

JKCalhoun: Saw two in my area on the map.I drove out to investigate, ended up adding two more to the site.

sodality2: https://dontgetflocked.com/

JKCalhoun: Cool, but…I was hoping for an online game, maybe Escape From Flockopolis.Driving sim (using Google street view) where you try to avoid the Flock.

pseudalopex: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1][1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

TiredOfLife: That's because car theft was legalized in US

smalltorch: There's also a application called deflock that lets you map them easy

mmooss: This sounds like the usual talking points.> left-leaning, anti-policeAs if there is any correlation, or crimes don't occur in right-leaning locales.> hypothetical/theoretical harmFreedom is very real, and includes security from the state. The latter risks are hardly theoretical in history and very present today.

mulmen: [delayed]

fubdopsp: Yes, that's the submission we're commenting on ;)

2cynykyl: This is probably not a helpful comment because it's basically a daydreamers fantasy, but here goes...Doesn't all the surveillance concern go away if we just remove license plates from cars? Our plates identify us nearly perfectly.

Intermernet: Flock provide more than just ALPRs. They also have systems that track people.It actually annoys me that people focus purely on the ALPRs when the other cameras are arguably much worse.

Intermernet: One of the main arguments against flock is their abysmal security, lack of transparency, and flagrant dishonesty. If they solved these problems then we can have a discussion about the cameras themselves. I personally would have less of a problem with them if the footage was locked down, encrypted and could only be accessed with a subpoena, but law enforcement really want dragnet surveillance, so that's unlikely to occur.

0xbadcafebee: [delayed]

bubblewand: I've yet to see an amount of property crime that can get the cops to lift a finger. I've seen them ignore a low-six-figures-stolen string of after-hours break-ins at businesses, captured at multiple location on camera with clear shots of the vehicle, legible plates, and faces of the perps. Just straight-up gave the impression they thought anyone believing they might want to look into it was a moron. And no, given where this happened it wasn't because of that "prosecutors won't charge anyway" thing people complain about some places (it's led me to wonder how much of that is cops just looking to pass the blame on cases they had no intention of investigating anyway).

ergocoder: I do blame cops and prosecutors.But it's also your neighbors, friends, and co-workers who yell at cops and prosecutors to not arrest nor charge property crimes.

sciencejerk: Maybe they should require a warrant and log access? Do you think this could be solved with access control?

sciencejerk: That sucks. Sorry to hear it

tsbischof: I made a version which does the avoidance dynamically at runtime, works for any tracks you want to use: https://alprwatch.org/navigation

tsbischof: If you want to explore navigation I made an app: https://alprwatch.org/navigation. It works fully offline, you just need to download the maps and overlays

groggo: I live in Sausalito just north of SF. We have a few cameras on the way into town. Seeing this map actually makes me feel safer. Sure there are hypothetical privacy issues, but for me they're easily outweighed by safety. I don't really get the issue. Ideally this information would be available to law enforcement, but would require a warrant. Is the problem that they can access all of this data without a warrant now?

Rapzid: They are all over certain neighborhoods and areas in my metro.. At first I thought it was due to the wealth of the neighborhoods but.. Now I'm wondering if the maps is just not fully filled in :|

Rapzid: Copper Cam.

dopidopHN2: I don't understand the connection?What is the guy stealing tbe screw was to walk or bike ?

k33n: I’m a problem solver.

NoSalt: I wonder how long until the site gets taken down. You know ... to protect the children.

dopidopHN2: The data is persisted in OSM. You can consult it with various non web Client

nyc_data_geek1: If a technology, backdoor or capability exists, it's not a question of if it will be abused, but rather when, how, and by whom.Stop being obtuse.

k33n: Technophobic take tbh

dopidopHN2: Oh, they do. Sometimes its different providers.This map is missing info for my area. It's hard to not be in that network

dspillett: > Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.Whether or not that is true, I suspect it is, the best way to avoid fines for breaking traffic regulations is to not break traffic regulations. They can't make anything from you that way if you do.

pc86: Until they start changing speed limits, adjusting the timing on yellow lights, or just saying you ran a stop sign when you didn't and - oops! - they happened to have their dashcam off or their car angled so the actual intersection was just out of view.

dspillett: If they are that corrupt then you have problems beyond traffic fines. Get your own dash cam and such so you can prove they are lying. No, in an ideal world you shouldn't have to, but if you have a corrupt police force you aren't living in an ideal world.

nektro: great resource but the expanding dots are a really terrible way to represent this

buellerbueller: Right, I'm sure they'll get right on it.

1e1a: Birds tend to be attracted to seeds.

pc86: You think more than 5% of the "private sector" cars on the road have ALPRs because of car repo bounties?Regardless, you're being needlessly pedantic.

insane_dreamer: Are these the same as the speed limit cameras (we have a few of those -- no idea if they are Flock or continuously recording)?

sciencejerk: I'll acknowledge that there might be some abuses of the use of Flock data by authorities (thanks for sharing citations). I would argue that this is an access control problem: do police departments have broad, unrestricted, unmonitored persistent access to these video feeds? (I oppose this). Is Flock insisting that police departments should have this access?

sciencejerk: Based on comments here, I'm thinking that a lot of the Flock opposition is affiliated with the anti-ICE movements. Flock seems to be viewed here as a tool to persecute and hunt down law-abiding government enemies, potentially bypassing civil liberties.I don't deny that Flock systems could and may have been used in that manner, but that doesn't seem to be its main purpose or use. Presently I'm seeing Flock as a net win for most law abiding persons, and I believe that its use should and can be highly restricted and monitored as a tool to make the country safer. No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water

senordevnyc: And what is the "actual solution to the problem"?

smalltorch: Haha. I meant an Android application. The website doesn't let you submit. The app makes it easy to submit.

nyc_data_geek1: No, this is an entirely pragmatic take. Show me where it's not been proven correct.It's in fact an argument in favor of strong encryption, privacy by design, and security by default.