[HN Gopher] Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in ...
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Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA
Built this over the last few days, based on a Rust codebase that
parses the latest ALPR reports from OpenStreetMaps, calculates
navigation statistics from every tagged residential building to
nearby amenities, and tests each route for intersection with those
ALPR cameras (Flock being the most widespread). These have gotten
more controversial in recent months, due to their indiscriminate
large scale data collection, with 404 Media publishing many
original pieces (https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/) about their
adoption and (ab)use across the country. I wanted to use open
source datasets to track the rapid expansion, especially per-
county, as this data can be crucial for 'deflock' movements to
petition counties and city governments to ban and remove them. In
some counties, the tracking becomes so widespread that most people
can't go anywhere without being photographed. This includes
possibly sensitive areas, like places of worship and medical
facilities. The argument for their legality rests upon the notion
that these cameras are equivalent to 'mere observation', but the
enormous scope and data sharing agreements in place to share and
access _millions_ of records without warrants blurs the lines of
the fourth amendment.
Author : sodality2
Score : 78 points
Date : 2025-12-10 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alpranalysis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (alpranalysis.com)
| DivingForGold wrote:
| https://archive.ph/et1uD
| runtimepanic wrote:
| One thing this surfaces nicely is how scale changes the privacy
| model. Individually these look like "mere observation," but once
| you can reconstruct routine movement patterns across counties,
| the data starts behaving more like long-term tracking than casual
| surveillance.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where
| filming in public is a constitutionally protected right and
| networked ALPR capability is possible (if not regularly offered
| yet) in commodity doorbell cameras.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where
| filming in public is a constitutionally protected right a
|
| It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals
| to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of
| corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without
| restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights
| already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is
| unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be
| protected under the fourth amendment.
| hamdingers wrote:
| If a home or business owner sets up Ring cameras, is it fair
| to say Amazon is recording in public? That feels like blaming
| Canon for the behavior of a paparazzi, but perhaps there are
| reasons those aren't equivalent I'm not aware of.
| autoexec wrote:
| > hat feels like blaming Canon for the behavior of a
| paparazzi, but perhaps there are reasons those aren't
| equivalent I'm not aware of.
|
| The difference between ring cameras and paparazzi using a
| canon camera is that the photos recorded to film/local
| storage can't be automatically compiled with the footage
| captured from everyone else's canon camera to create
| databases of people and track their movements, activities,
| attributes, etc.
|
| It really depends on where the data goes and who can access
| it. I'd even go so far as to say that keeping that data on
| the cloud is fine as long as the data is encrypted, amazon
| doesn't access it beyond storage and deliver to the
| customer (meaning that they can no longer mine it for
| personal data) and amazon cannot give access to anyone else
| (including police who should have to request footage
| directly from the camera owners).
| hamdingers wrote:
| We seem to have strayed into your opinions on how things
| _ought to be_ , while my comment was meant to acknowledge
| the reality (unfortunate though it may be) that we live
| in.
|
| The law doesn't make this distinction you're making. If
| you replace Canon with "iPhone/Android with cloud photo
| backup enabled" then your issue with Ring cameras applies
| to all smartphones. Maybe you'd prefer that not be the
| case, but it is.
|
| In any case, I'd prefer we not get hung up on this lossy
| analogy since neither activity is restricted by current
| law which is my actual point.
| autoexec wrote:
| Our current reality is that the photos taken with my
| Canon aren't being handed over to police without my
| knowing it, and aren't used to track people. The same
| can't be said about footage from people's ring cameras.
|
| It's not clear to me that photos taken with an iphone
| with cloud backup enabled are compiled into national
| databases that track people's movements like ring and
| flock cameras are today either.
|
| Currently flock and ring cameras are tracking people at a
| scale that canon cameras just aren't. Therefore it is
| fair to blame Amazon and flock but not cannon for the
| manner in which amazon and flock uses the footage their
| cameras collect to violate our rights.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > filming in public is a constitutionally protected right
|
| As with everything, there's much nuance to this "right".
|
| https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...
| hamdingers wrote:
| Only the government is bound by the fourth amendment, as long
| as the people setting up the cameras and running the network
| are private citizens it's fair game (correct me if I'm
| wrong).
|
| Imagining a universe where companies are also bound by that
| is an interesting thought exercise. Many products (cloud
| photo backup, foursquare style "check-ins," location sharing
| with friends, etc) would be simply impossible because the
| aggregated data amounts to comprehensive surveillance.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm a private citizen. On my house we have an ALPR Axis camera
| pointing down the street (in addition to Axis cameras around
| the whole perimiter.) And when the police ask, we almost always
| provide them with data. I feel perfectly justified doing this,
| and we've helped solved several crimes.
| ruthie_cohen wrote:
| Most people would do the same in your situation, we should
| expect citizens to want to help victims of crime, especially
| crimes against the person.
|
| However I think there's a significant difference between a
| single household and a centralised network of cameras across
| dozens of states.
|
| For me the core issue of this is private enterprise holding
| gigantic amounts of PII, and the forms that is taking.
| Computer0 wrote:
| Hi enemy! :)
| crims0n wrote:
| Sounds like a rough neighborhood, stay safe.
| tptacek wrote:
| It is an inevitability, because a critical mass of
| municipalities are going to roll these out such that there
| isn't a practical route to take through any major metro without
| being recorded.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| The county lists are wrong, at least they are for my state of New
| Jersey. We have 21 counties, not 27. Is it picking up the
| bordering counties that might have overlapping contracts or
| something?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| One of those counties is Rockland, which is in NY. I wonder if
| it's counting bordering counties for states, since the
| assumption may be that the closest essential services for some
| Rockland residents may be in New Jersey.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I know at least in Rockland's case, their power utility
| extends slightly into NJ. Can see it on statewide power
| outage trackers like this one:
| https://projects.nj.com/data/outagetracker/
| sodality2 wrote:
| It pulls counties from OSM administrative boundaries of level
| 6, which according to the OSM wiki, is "State counties and
| county equivalents, Territorial municipalities" (https://wiki.o
| penstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag%3aboundary=administr...). It does
| lead to some weird oddities, like counties with under 10
| homes... I'd rather not manually correct it, since I want to
| rely on pure OSM data. (Unless you mean there is an actual bug
| in the processing and there's counties listed that aren't in
| the right states...)
|
| I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each
| county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to
| verify/edit.
| eesmith wrote:
| There are also not 53 states.
| mv4 wrote:
| yeah we have 8 counties in CT, not 14. The names are also
| wrong.
| sodality2 wrote:
| As far as I know there's no easy fix to this. It's the
| counties as reported by OpenStreetMaps' administrative
| boundaries.
| s1mon wrote:
| I understand why these statistics may be interesting, but all I
| really want to see is a map of the locations of the ALPR cameras.
| I would add an easy link to that data on this site.
| sodality2 wrote:
| DeFlock is the first link in the "Related ALPR & Flock
| Projects" section, it contains a map.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://ringmast4r.github.io/FLOCK/
|
| https://deflock.me/
| yannyu wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot as I see more and more reckless
| driving in the areas I live in. Surveillance is generally a net
| negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around
| schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. We
| seem to have a worst of all situations where traffic is getting
| increasingly difficult to enforce, driving is getting more
| dangerous year by year, and we're terrified of government
| overreach if we add any automation at all to enforcement.
|
| I don't know the solution, but I do know that in the US we've
| lost 10-15 years of progress when it comes to traffic fatalities.
| sodality2 wrote:
| These cameras are currently not used at all for traffic/speed
| enforcement. The best they would do is track more serious
| crimes like hit-and-runs by photographing cars in the area.
| yannyu wrote:
| Ah, that's helpful and something for me to learn more about.
| Thanks for the info.
| chaps wrote:
| > but it's also bad when you see people speeding around
| schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.
|
| This is not what Flock seeks to curb.
| hamdingers wrote:
| I agree. It's frustrating that we have ended up in a reality
| where vehicle movement is heavily tracked, but we're not using
| that technology to do the most obvious and productive thing.
|
| My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to
| all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but
| has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for
| years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so
| back in 2023.
|
| Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the
| networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still
| cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording
| all drivers.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I live in NYC. People used to be afraid of double parking. Like
| you I regularly see the same bat-shit driving and no one seems
| to care to say or do anything. It's bonkers.
| quamserena wrote:
| Part of the public pushback is that people almost always drive
| the "feels like" speed and not the posted speedlimit. We build
| 6 lane roads and then wonder why people go 50mph when it's 35
| posted, it's because it's 6 lanes and 35 feels slow. Cities
| profit from this in the form of speed cameras, which is why
| they've been outlawed in a lot of places.
| derektank wrote:
| If the speeds aren't appropriate for the built environment,
| then the limits should be changed or the environment should
| be changed. Enforcement of the law should be consistent
| regardless of the quality of the law.
| asdff wrote:
| The driver blithely keeping with the flow of traffic is not
| the one I am worried about. It is the one who is aggressively
| trying to cut through the flow of traffic while putting
| everyone and themselves in danger that I worry about.
| ajross wrote:
| > driving is getting more dangerous year by year
|
| Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick
| in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities
| per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent
| decades. Driving was _twice_ as dangerous in the 80 's as it is
| now.
| standardUser wrote:
| That's thanks entirely to government-required safety
| features, not skilled drivers.
| youngNed wrote:
| There is picture of a cyclist. He is holding a stick.
|
| The cyclist puts the stick between his spokes.
|
| The cyclist lies on the road, cursing the government, for
| causing this.
| hamdingers wrote:
| You are incorrect. Fatalities in the US leveled out in the
| early 2010s and have been climbing since then. In _all other
| developed nations_ they continued trending downwards.
|
| This is not a statistical anomaly that can be handwaved by
| pointing out that things were worse 40 years ago. Roads in
| the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
| ajross wrote:
| > You are incorrect
|
| Sigh. I hate that phrasing. But OK, fine: you are
| misreading me, misanalysing the data, or just plain
| spinning to mislead readers.
|
| Fatalities per capita and per mile driven go steadily
| downward until covid, and _maybe_ there 's a bump after
| that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_
| rate_in... If you have numbers (you don't cite any) showing
| otherwise, they are being polluted by demographic trends
| (the US having higher population growth doesn't say
| anything about driver behavior).
|
| > Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
|
| So spinning it is. Would you rather drive in Germany in
| 2002 or the US in 2025? Seems like "uniquely lethal"
| doesn't really constitute a good faith representation of
| the truth.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad
| when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through
| stop signs, and running red lights.
|
| The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the
| problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give
| me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that
| particular problem.
|
| It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement
| without the need of these devices. We have evidence that
| they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start
| there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of
| which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the
| pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting
| off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which
| come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds
| you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical
| buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common
| functions in touchscreen menus might help.
|
| There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer
| roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements
| at all times.
| Barathkanna wrote:
| This is great work. Once ALPR coverage is dense enough that you
| can't go anywhere without generating a permanent record, the
| "mere observation" argument falls apart. Mapping this openly is
| one of the few ways communities can actually understand what
| they've signed up for.
| ruthie_cohen wrote:
| If I was American I would certainly be using this tool as a
| consideration when moving / buying a new house.
|
| I've watched a lot of the coverage by Benn Jordan on Flock
| cameras and their inherent vulnerabilities, and it's deeply
| concerning.
|
| The applications of these technologies far outpaces appropriate
| checks and balances, and the increasing fusion between law
| enforcement, intelligence and private industry is largely ignored
| by the larger population.
|
| Thanks for developing this, it's important to visualise the
| virus-like spread of these technologies and see where it is
| concentrated.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Number plates are just one of the privacy tracking technologies.
| Any modern connected car infotainment system will report and have
| that data sold or anything that has Bluetooth can be tracked.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Recent car tracking discussion here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097624
| snarf21 wrote:
| Including the camera and microphone in our pocket that pings
| every cell tower every time we move.
| sodality2 wrote:
| At least as per Carpenter v. United States, that data
| requires a warrant, not just any cop/LEO in the country
| typing in a license plate with reasoning as 'investigation'.
| That's a much better standard.
| sodality2 wrote:
| To an extent this data is within our reach to stop (buy old
| car, unplug cellular modules, etc). With ALPRs the only option
| is moving.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Bluetooth? You're overthinking this. We've been mandated to
| carry 4-5 transmitters _per vehicle_ broadcasting their UIDs at
| 315 MHz since the mid 2000s:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_TPMS
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I have an SDR in a facility that is a public parking lot. It
| picks up TMPS incidentally and I'm definitely able to track
| individual vehicles.
| jcims wrote:
| I had a thought a while back about companies like Tesla, with
| cameras on the road and driving models that could classify bad
| drivers, being in a position to at least a) avoid those drivers
| if they are encountered on the road and b) record/report them to
| the police.
|
| Then I had an intrusive thought of a small squad of cybertruck
| 'enforcers' running around autonomously, tracking these drivers
| down via the live network of incoming video and doling out
| punishment to the chief offenders.
| rjsw wrote:
| Or the Tesla could just record where it is at all times.
| tptacek wrote:
| From just a few days ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170302
|
| (Repeating: in a few months sites like this will be replaceable
| with a static HTML page that says "yes, you've been tagged by an
| ALPR".)
| xnx wrote:
| I'm surprised an app like Citizen hasn't tried to match Flock
| with a dashcam that automatically shares recordings.
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(page generated 2025-12-10 23:00 UTC)