[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 : 230 points
Date : 2025-12-10 17:42 UTC (1 days 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.
| wwweston wrote:
| Retention is one good line between enforcement and tracking.
|
| If we wanted to solve this problem while retaining the
| benefits, what we'd do is have stiff penalties for warrantless
| retention and required yearly independent audits of systems.
| 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:
| Ah! This looks like a bug with cross-border calculations.
| Ideally it would not show a Rockland County, NJ - it might
| cross state borders to perform calculations but they should
| all have a 'home state' that matches to the right county.
| Thanks for the example case, I'll work on a fix
| 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.
| cjensen wrote:
| California includes a number of counties which are actually in
| Baja California and Baja California del Sur.
| 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.
| genewitch wrote:
| so what do they seek to curb? freedom of movement?
| thatcat wrote:
| It's an opportunistic solution to a budget problem.
|
| Local governments have extra money from property price
| bubble increasing tax revenues.
|
| At the same time there are great open source image analysis
| models for companies to put on a pole using cheap android
| hw and a solar panel and make bold claims about solving all
| crime, then they can sell that data again to 3rd parties
| like insurance. Also can start buying access to more video
| feeds from ring cameras etc and resell that. They'll hire
| someone to make a ux to integrate it into PDs later, for a
| premium of course.
| dole wrote:
| "Crime."
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-
| st...
| 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.
| cons0le wrote:
| NYC should have been the model to follow. Instead of flock
| cameras, cities should have bounty systems: record a video of
| a speed violation with a plate, and get 10% of the ticket
| revenue. Enforcement would explode.
|
| We could of had a system where we used the technology we
| already had in our hands to democratize speed enforcement,
| instead of corporatizing it
| Fnoord wrote:
| Interesting. 'But your honor, it is AI enhanced. I wasn't
| speeding.'
|
| 'Weird, I got this footage here from another angle and it
| shows you did. We also got the data from your car. You were
| speeding son.'
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Pitting people against each other in the service of the
| state is likely to cause problems at scale and in the long
| run.
|
| Frankly, I think it's a miracle that nobody has been beaten
| into a coma or killed over NYC's bounty program yet.
| barnas2 wrote:
| NYC already tried Snitching as a Service during COVID, and
| it went terribly. I grew up with a neighbor who would
| constantly record people and call the cops over every
| little perceived infraction. Everyone in the neighborhood
| hated her, including the cops. I do not want to live in a
| society that encourages those people.
| cons0le wrote:
| I definitely agree it can go too far. Maybe only allow
| bounties for active, dangerous crimes like speeding,
| drunk driving, and racing?
| salawat wrote:
| No Stasi. No Salem witch trials. Thank you. Do not need
| to retread that ground.
| kaikai wrote:
| How do you imagine this working in a world where video
| editing is so easy?
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The speeds are appropriate for the roads generally. I mean,
| at the lowest level speed limits are a matter of social
| consensus so the broad public is tautologically correct.
|
| The problem is that knocking the magic number on the sign
| down by 5-15 and then simply not enforcing it too seriously
| results in less screeching Karens harassing the politicians
| who then harass the bureaucracy than taking a hard line
| about "well akshually this is the engineered speed for the
| road".
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I love when cities time their lights so that aggressive
| drivers just get hit with waiting at a red light while
| driving the speed limit means hitting greens for long
| stretches.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, and about twice I've seen this done _really_ right,
| wherein they post signs of the synchronization speed
| (e.g., "Lights Timed for 35mph"). I just get in sync
| with one light and adjust speed and it feels almost magic
| to go a few miles hitting every green light (it kind of
| _is_ the macic of math).
|
| It'd be cool if more roads were implemented that way.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's a part of downtown here that is known for being
| set up like this. However, it's been a bust while there's
| been a lot of construction blocking lanes so nothing
| moves at speed.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| I have the same in my area, but instead the lights are
| synchronized to slow traffic as much as possible. They
| literally coordinate to make you stop at as many lights
| as possible and grid lock at rush hour so the highway
| doesn't get flooded.
|
| I walk my kids to school, but when I do drive the 1.1
| miles there are no less than 12 stoplights/stop signs.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Sure, some people will get hit with the reds. Some people
| will learn the timing and learn that you can run just one
| red and then hit all greens, or that it will save you
| 5+min if you hammer down and pull a "clearly not ok" pass
| to get around some idiot who's going too slow to make the
| green timing.
|
| So yeah, you're reducing speeding, number go up, pat
| yourself on the back. But you're also increasing the
| incidence of something rarer than speeding, but way
| worse.
|
| This is the same problem that 4-way stops at roads that
| don't deserve them create, you're basically teaching
| people that the signage is bullshit.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Upping the speed limit reduces the incidence of the latter
| because just about everyone has a "fuck this I'm weaving"
| threshold and the number of people who hit it goes down
| when you reduce the incidence of rolling clusters of
| traffic caused by the handful of people who religiously
| follow the speed limit even when not appropriate.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just because a road "feels" like it can handle more speed
| does not mean that it is. The wider streets are built to
| handle the volume of cars, not necessarily meant to become a
| speed way. There are several 6 lane roads in my area while
| being wide and well built still have many intersections only
| controlled by stop signs for the smaller streets with
| multiple intersections controlled by stop lights at the
| larger cross streets.
|
| People unable to recognize this and only driving by the feels
| are the problem. Hand wavy comments like yours suggesting
| using the _feels_ as being okay do not help the situation
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| Now you're relying on Jimmy "Buck" Rawgers born and raised
| in Billton county working at the DOT setting the speed
| limits and the traffic light cadence.
|
| How many roads are 35 when they should be 50 simply because
| some local yokel asshole made a stink at city counsel 10
| years ago and now it's impossible to change?
| pastel8739 wrote:
| Basing your speed on what the road looks like may not be
| "okay" or "legal", but it's what people do. It's just not
| useful to claim that individual people are the problem when
| this is something that is overwhelmingly true across the
| entire population---a broader solution than individual
| responsibility is the only thing that will actually work.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Speeds are fundamentally a tradeoff between risk and
| reward. In nominally democratic societies we place these
| thresholds based on some approximation of social consensus.
| The general public literally cannot be wrong because their
| rough consensus, the fat part of the bell curve if you
| will, is what determines what the right speed is.
|
| Your comment is literally the principal Skinner "no it's
| everyone else who's wrong" meme.
| arjie wrote:
| The speed cameras in San Francisco have to result in lowered
| speeding over the 18 month period they're active. If they
| don't, they will be pulled. Seems pretty well-designed.
| Perhaps the fines are weak but it's good that they're there.
| 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.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Did you open the wikipedia article you linked? The first
| image contradicts you, see the caption:
|
| > Per capita road accident deaths in the US reversed
| their decline in the early 2010s.
|
| Amusing that you accuse me of bad faith framing and then
| pose a nonsense question like this:
|
| > Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in
| 2025?
|
| I cannot time travel and neither can you. The comparison
| that matters is US in 2025 vs other developed nations in
| 2025, and with that framing the US is uniquely lethal.
|
| Of course, a good faith reader of my comment would
| understand this, but we already know that's not you since
| you did the research and have decided to be wrong anyway.
| selectodude wrote:
| According to the link that you posted, the roads in
| Germany in 2002 were quite a bit safer than the roads are
| in the USA in 2025. And they don't have speed limits.
| Absolute no brainer to me.
|
| Anyway, not to pile on but you are absolutely incorrect.
| Forgive the phrasing.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| German roads absolutely do have speed limits. Only
| certain rural sections of the Autobahn don't, but that's
| not representative of the country as a whole, or even the
| Autobahn as a whole.
| 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.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I can't think of a way to implement this that wouldn't ban
| passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle.
| Which could be even a bus or limousine.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I can totally imagine a society where
| this inability is perfectly acceptable because it severely
| reduces the #1 killer of people from 5-55yo. I don't think
| we live in that society, if Apple and Google flipped a
| switch tomorrow to do that people would freak out, but I
| could imagine a rational, fictional society that had
| different shared values.
| mikem170 wrote:
| A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are
| impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to
| mention texting while driving!
|
| I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe
| buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to
| connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices
| offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of
| the world.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Lots of cars now come with a WiFi hot spot as part of
| their offerings. There's no way to prevent the driver
| from also connecting to it and circumventing whatever ill
| conceived notion this is
| autoexec wrote:
| Even connected to wifi a cell phone canstill use the
| wireless network. Even airplane more won't actually stop
| your phone from connecting anymore. GPS data can also be
| transmitted in the background over wifi back to
| apple/google and/or the device manufacturer.
|
| If they really wanted to push this they could do it
| directly in the baseband chipset and bypass the OS
| entirely when deciding to lock down the device to some
| kind of "travel mode" with limited functionality (such as
| no texting or no browser)
|
| Not that I'm advocating for that sort of thing, but it's
| good to keep in mind that we don't really own the
| cellular devices we pay for and that even in the rare
| case we have root we can't stop them from doing what they
| want to our devices as long as they control the closed
| hardware.
| mikem170 wrote:
| I mentioned buses and trains, and was thinking that only
| those mobile wifi hotspots would be permitted,
| whitelisted for 5g service. Hotspots in (human driven)
| cars would not. That might encourage some people to take
| the bus?
|
| I agree with the other poster about this being more
| workable in a fictional society with different shared
| values.
| autoexec wrote:
| Not entirely. The phones can defect if there are other
| phones nearby, so a single phone in a car on a highway
| going 75mph could be assumed to be a driver, but that is
| still just an assumption.
| crapple8430 wrote:
| And the driver will just carry two phones, and be even
| more distracted than before. Cool
| fragmede wrote:
| The answer is to take the human out of the equation, and have
| the computer drive. Comma.ai works well enough. Tesla is
| mostly there. Waymo works.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Which is also bad for privacy
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The standards for evidince, processes for enforcement and
| court side of things are not set up for cheap enforcement of
| "that clearly ain't right" behavior. They're set up for
| revenue enforcement of easy to prove but not necessarily bad
| in abstract offenses.
|
| Police can't substantially increase enforcement overall
| because that would just cause bad political optics, say
| nothing of stops that needlessly escalate to being newsworthy
| in a bad way. They'd necessarily issue a hundred petty
| bullshit tickets for every deserved ticket for legitimately
| bad behavior. It just wouldn't work. It would be like trying
| to plow a field with the ripper on the back of a bulldozer.
| It kinda looks similar but it's wrong for the job.
|
| And all of this is based on the assumption that we're trying
| to enforce things that the broad public agrees need strict
| enforcement, not whatever the original comment wants.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| In the US, a traffic ticket is an indictment of a crime (says
| it on the ticket. I wish I didn't know that fact).
|
| That means that you have a right to trial/appeal, and the
| accuser (the cop) needs to show up, if you request a trial.
|
| Traffic cameras can't accuse you of a crime, so they are
| considered civil infractions (no points, but also means they
| are a bitch to appeal). They can issue realtime civil
| citations, though.
|
| ALPRS can't do either. They are forensic tools; not
| enforcement tools.
|
| I believe in the UK, a camera can convict you of a crime, so
| they can issue severe tickets. They wouldn't really be able
| to do that, in the US.
|
| In my county (Suffolk, NY), they just stopped all the
| redlight cameras. I doubt they would do so for ALPRs.
|
| Also, I think some ALPRs are private. There's a shopping
| center, not too far from here, that's in a relatively high-
| crime neighborhood. They have cameras and ALPRs, all over the
| parking lots.
| ericmcer wrote:
| They have done automated enforcement a few times and it
| always sucks because the systems don't use discretion.
|
| Someone going 40 in a 30 and swerving around other cars gets
| treated the same as someone going 40 when the road is empty.
| Someone slowing to 1-2mph before safely rolling through a
| stop sign get the same ding as someone blowing through it at
| 30mph.
|
| If AIs can somehow learn how to take all this footage and
| enforce the spirit of the law (citing dangerous driving)
| instead of the letter I will fully support it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| We cracked down on driving under the influence with changes
| from DWI to DUI. In the 10-15 years you mention, the prevalence
| of distracted driving from mobile devices has gotten out of
| hand. There's no field sobriety test that can prove one was
| distracted by a device. That makes this much more difficult to
| crack down on.
| loeg wrote:
| Sure, though it is very easy to visually identify drivers
| looking at their phones. (Unless they have illegal tint.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Only if you're driving next to the car. Speeding obviously
| can be detected from a distance. Driving under the
| influence also can be seen from a distance.
|
| I could see having a cop and a camera stationed in a place
| working as a spotter that then radios to other cops up
| ahead to pull over in an old school speed trap set up.
| However, that would take a lot of man power and
| coordination that I doubt most departments would care to
| do. We've seen plenty of YT videos of people trying to make
| a point of catching distracted drivers. The cops just need
| to give a shit, and want to do something about it.
| loeg wrote:
| It doesn't take a targeted trap or driving next to. It's
| like 1 in 6 drivers at any time; it's super easy to spot
| if you're looking. One cop could pick off drivers no
| problem without any coordination.
| aners wrote:
| We have very few alternatives to driving in the US so we have
| very lax driver training and testing.
|
| Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage
| speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's
| very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic
| calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers
| near these roadways.
|
| In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could
| drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| Yep, the US has built itself a car-centric society over the
| last century, and there's essentially no way to change that
| now without burning everything down and starting over from
| scratch. They can't make driver training too strict because
| too many people would fail, and then have no way to get to
| work, and then who knows what those people would do. They
| can't turn cities pedestrian-friendly without tearing down
| everything there now and just the legal hurdles there are
| immense. I just don't see a way for this to change
| meaningfully in a lifetime, outside of a few little pockets
| here and there (like some towns or cities creating extremely
| limited pedestrian-only zones, which would then need a lot of
| parking to be useful for people, basically like an outdoor
| shopping mall).
| sgc wrote:
| Your examples don't seem to represent the leading causes of
| fatalities from traffic accidents in the US, which remain
| distracted driving (phones and crappy touchscreen controls,
| etc) and drunk driving. People rolling through a stop sign /
| performing a 'California' stop are nowhere near the massive
| security concern to authorize the ideal surveillance state. To
| deal with the bigger issues you would have to film peoples
| actions in their cars and run it all through ai to accuse them
| of driving while drowsy. That would be an incredible and lazy
| failure. Also, fatalities per mile had a massive surge in
| 2020-2021, but they have been steadily dropping since then
| (2024 in wikipedia estimated a 1.27 per 1m miles, about the
| same as 2008). If the trend continues, in a year or two we will
| be back to the early 2010s lows without draconian measures.
|
| The solution, as always, is better infrastructure and support
| at multiple levels, not beating everybody with a stick.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I get the vibe from his comment that the visible deviance
| from rules of the state is what he's really concerned with
| and that the death and destruction is just the reason
| everyone else is suppose to care.
| jldugger wrote:
| On my way home, I noticed at a stoplight across the street from
| Apple Park that the driver in the lane next to me had his phone
| mounted up high in landscape mode and was watching the
| Simpsons. Just absolutely unhinged behavior lately.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Eventually we'll have autonomous vehicles which will mitigate
| many of these issues, but will the surveillance infrastructure
| then be reduced? Probably not.
|
| War is peace.
|
| Surveillance is safety.
| mschuster91 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.
|
| Speeding and running red lights can be combated without
| affecting the privacy of innocents on the road. A debate can
| and should be had about the placement of radar traps though,
| many are straight off highway robberies trapping people who
| don't notice a speed-limit sign that is visually hard to
| notice.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The solution is to have you abused by the system so that you
| realize that petty deviance is not something the dragnet should
| be brought to bear on if it must exist at all.
|
| Your opinions are directly counterproductive on these petty
| issues. You ask for the state to use the jackboot. The jackboot
| just makes people hate the state and think in terms of "will I
| get caught". If not for you people trying to force compliance
| on this, that and the next thing the state would be in higher
| standing in people's minds and voluntary "when it matters" or
| "because it's the right thing to do" compliance would be
| higher. Sure, we could add more jackboot, but that costs money
| and no democratic-ish system is gonna allocate a bunch of money
| to do stuff everyone hates.
| drunner wrote:
| A camera doesn't stop those acts though, it may only discourage
| those who know about it at a huge cost of privacy and rights.
|
| How about we build better infrastructure and regulate vehicles
| since those do actually stop this behavior. Most of those red
| lights and stoplights in the US should be roundabouts. Narrower
| lanes and other traffic calming measures should be much more
| pervasive. Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of
| control.
|
| Compare US traffic and pedestrian deaths to the rest of the
| world, or at least a lot of EU countries. Its embarrassing.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm#F1_down
| mrb wrote:
| Thanks for this CDC link! So the pedestrian death rate and
| the overall road traffic death rate is about three times
| higher in the US compared to other high-income countries...
| Mind-boggling.
| tristor wrote:
| > Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control.
|
| Many manufacturers are now selling pre-lifted trucks. Here in
| Texas around a third of the vehicles on the road are pickup
| trucks, and about half of those have been lifted beyond
| standard height either from the factory or aftermarket,
| another third of vehicles are SUVs, most of which are
| significantly larger than necessary to be fit for purpose for
| the driver and occupants.
|
| This situation was /caused/ by government regulation and it
| can be fixed by government regulation. It's absolutely absurd
| the gargantuan vehicles most people drive in the US, and the
| fact that we let people turn their vehicles into monster
| trucks and then operate them on public roads with impunity. I
| don't care how small someone's dick is, they don't get the
| right to drive a truck down the highway that can literally
| drive /over/ a modern standard sedan/hatchback. The
| continuing absurdity has turned into an iterated prisoner's
| dilemma which has resulted in more and more people buying
| SUVs and crossovers who by every measure do NOT need them.
| Absolutely is out of control, and it negatively impacts
| everyone, including the drivers of these vehicles.
| tristor wrote:
| > driving is getting more dangerous year by year
|
| My observation has been that the danger increase is a
| combination of three things:
|
| 1. Lack of situational awareness/awareness of surroundings.
| This manifests in various ways like improper merging, improper
| turns into traffic, turning across multiple lanes, and left-
| lane hogs.
|
| 2. Frustration becomes aggression. This also manifests in
| multiple ways, but primarily is seen through tail-gating (in
| response to left-lane hogs) and swimming through traffic (in
| response to left-lane hogs), as well as road-rage (mostly in
| response to the other misbehavior).
|
| 3. Constant distraction. I have seen SO MANY drivers literally
| watching videos on a tablet, playing games, or otherwise
| driving at high rates of speed (70mph+) while fully engaged in
| something other than driving. It's at epidemic proportions.
|
| The issue is, by and large, not people doing rolling stops
| (which by the way have never been proven to cause an increase
| in accidents when performed properly) or speeding (generally,
| some exceptions like school zones do matter). Running red
| lights is definitely a problem that is more common place, and
| is likely a part of all 3 of these these.
|
| I feel like to a large degree all of this is a symptom of a
| wider societial issue where everyone acts in selfish and self-
| centered ways, completely ignoring their impacts on others, and
| moving from moments to moments where they can engage with their
| phone/social-media, to the exclusion of all else. I don't think
| phones/social-media /caused/ the problem, I think it
| exacerbates it though. Every aspect of our society is worsening
| because the revealed behavior of our population is one of lack
| of care or outright disdain for everyone else around them and
| an absolute obsession with serving their own interests above
| all else. That this manifests in driving is unsurprising.
| lunias wrote:
| IMO the issue is that there's little to no enforcement outside
| of speeding. I see people get pulled over for speeding in a
| straight line even if it's relatively safe to do so, but never
| for talking on their phone, messing with the touch screen in
| their vehicle, left turns from the right lane and vice versa,
| failure to keep lane, failure to yield, failure to signal,
| cutting people off, driving a vehicle unfit for the road, etc.
|
| It usually takes about 5 minutes of driving to observe someone
| doing something that I would pull them over for. I don't think
| cops need all this automated surveillance, they just need to
| drive around and be proactive.
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| I'm thinking more the Tesla could identify bad drivers around
| it and fire off a notification.
| gosub100 wrote:
| As an aside, there are currently companies that do this but for
| delinquent auto loans to expedite the repo process.
| ericmcer wrote:
| My dream is huge drones that get dispatched and harpoon
| dangerous drivers cars and fly away with them. "Oh a lifted
| truck with a modified exhaust just swerved onto the shoulder to
| pass me at 85mph, and there it goes"
| 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.
| tamimio wrote:
| What about Ring cams? Is there a deRing site? Also, the flock
| cams are beyond ALPR, I saw a video before about some
| investigation and one of the things was how flock was used to
| recognize a car without a plate. Flock is an automated car
| recognition system, the plate is just part of it. Makes me wonder
| if having extremely unique or "cloaking" car design will fool it.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I swear it's about 75% of houses I come across that have ring
| (or similar) cameras
| genewitch wrote:
| How come any area that has enough homes in the data set _and_
| ALPR have Veterinarians as the most surveilled, then Hospitals,
| then Libraries, usually over everything else, including food and
| church?
|
| The strange implication is that they're watching the vet office
| traffic to find people who are getting treated by vets instead of
| doctors?
|
| also my parish reports 0.0% across the board, and all the
| parishes near me. you have to get on the coast to get above 25%.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Perhaps there's some large chain of vets run by a PE firm where
| the PE firm did a blanket deal.
| genewitch wrote:
| I didn't mean to allude to this, but i heard that a lot of
| vet clinics are being bought by PE firms. The same way that a
| certain internet company is buying all the legal offices (and
| web medicine sites)
| sodality2 wrote:
| Vets/hospitals are far less common (and the former probably
| suffers from less tags as hospitals are more important) so the
| distance one must travel increases, so higher likelihood of
| crossing one. Especially compared to how common everything else
| is.
|
| If you check deflock.me, would you say that 0.0% aligns with
| what you expect?
| genewitch wrote:
| i suppose that makes sense.
|
| There's 6 cameras in the metro area per deflock.me, 3 at each
| Lowe's, and that's it. It's very easy to not get in range of
| those, at least on "my side" of the metro. How do we know
| that is all the ALPR in an area? Or rather, what's the
| confidence? I'd assume Home Depot would also have them, for
| example.
|
| note: maybe i need to restart firefox, but deflock.me is the
| slowest "map" based site i've seen since keyhole in the late
| 90s
| sodality2 wrote:
| The best thing you can do is keep an eye out and tag them
| manually. The second best is a FOIA to your county
| government - there's some good examples on deflock.me and
| templates on muckrack. But private ones are not going to be
| FOIA-able.
|
| The quality of ALPR tagging does probably lag behind true
| counts - for example, Williamsburg, VA has 28 tagged on
| OSM, but 32 are listed in the transparency log
| (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/williamsburg-va-pd).
| Unfortunately not much can be done except spotting them out
| and about (or wardriving with a BLE beacon scanner:
| https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-
| falco...)
| renewiltord wrote:
| When it's against the law to not be on an ALPR camera, only
| outlaws won't be on ALPR cameras! Well, in SF, this is generally
| true because there is no enforcement of a missing license plate.
| eliaspro wrote:
| Small nitpick: you're writing OpenStreetMaps instead of
| OpenStreetMap (no trailing s) everywhere.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Thanks, pushed a fix for the home page!
| DeathArrow wrote:
| So you have a set of positions for some services (coffee shops,
| groceries), a set of positions for cameras and a set of positions
| for homes.
|
| But how you model people actually driving each day and their
| paths? Because the accuracy of your conclusions seems to heavily
| depend on the accuracy of modelling.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I don't model daily paths as in 'coffee before work, then
| groceries on the way home'; I do straight shots from residences
| to each of these amenities. I don't know of a better way to do
| it than this; any more complicated model that tries to model
| 'daily routines' risks losing simplicity, as well as straying
| too far from actual driving behavior, and my main goal is
| extremely simple statistics.
| reallyaaryan wrote:
| Can you think of any use cases apart from government
| surveillance?
| fpauser wrote:
| Mass surveillance in the "Land of the Free" [tm]. _LOL_
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Data accuracy can be a problem. It lists 115 counties for
| Illinois, which is news to me since Illinois has 102 counties.
|
| For example, Kenosha County is in Wisconsin, not Illinois.
| jollyllama wrote:
| I don't see how this provides actionable info for the individual.
| Unfortunately, this is just going to be a dashboard for pro-
| surveillance elements to see "how are we doing in our neck of the
| woods?", or a sales tool for Flock to find untapped markets.
| sodality2 wrote:
| My goal is to provide actionable statistics for any 'deflock'
| movements in a certain county, by being able to point to
| specific statistics on surveillance. If even one motivated
| person uses my data to petition, I'll be happy; it doesn't have
| to be for the average person. There's tons of these movements,
| too. Deflock Olympia just succeeded:
| https://www.yelmonline.com/stories/commentary-olympia-joins-...
|
| Also, another answer to this is that there _is_ no overarching
| goal; I just wanted to build a large scale data analysis
| pipeline for fun :) I am no stranger to side projects to
| distract me from finals unfortunately.
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