[HN Gopher] An interactive map of Flock Cams
___________________________________________________________________
An interactive map of Flock Cams
Author : anjel
Score : 443 points
Date : 2026-03-04 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deflock.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (deflock.org)
| owlninja wrote:
| 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.
| ezfe wrote:
| You can go onto Open Street Map and tidy up the data. I would
| recommend surveying the actual situation first to ensure you
| don't mess anything up.
| bigwheels wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| When your car gets stolen, even with camera data, the police
| will not do anything.
| habinero wrote:
| The city might call you in a month when it gets towed
| wherever it was abandoned. The cops aren't going to look for
| it. That happened to me once.
| bubblewand wrote:
| 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).
| StayHuman wrote:
| On the "coordinated efforts" front, some anecdata:
|
| Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section
| about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted
| to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with
| links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post
| fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were
| marked as removed within a few minutes.
|
| Any other subject: posts fine.
|
| Try it yourself and see what you get.
| runjake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| pietervdvn wrote:
| You can use https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance to delete the
| cameras from OSM
| snailmailman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > It may technically be possible to route a drive around them
|
| That's an interesting idea...
| sodality2 wrote:
| https://dontgetflocked.com/
| baby_souffle wrote:
| I can't speak to flock but I know that other vendors in the
| space have software designed to calculate optimal locations
| to maximize probability at least one license plate scan for
| every trip taken.
|
| Presumably that software can then be used to upsell
| additional cameras because with an increased density your
| capabilities start to approximate real-time live position
| tracking instead of just getting approximate locations of hot
| plates.
| gentile wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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. :-/
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| 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.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> 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 wrote:
| 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.
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| > However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a
| felony stop
|
| At 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 wrote:
| Technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. If you
| can't make it safe then don't deploy it.
| mainmailman wrote:
| Why do anything at all?
| Firerouge wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Firerouge wrote:
| It's possible, but I can't find a corroborating news
| report, and it's the first I've heard this claim made
| about that case.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| You can't rely on Flock's "transparency" reports either,
| they're woefully inadequate. In our County, the Sheriff
| spoke of a PD in the County getting a Flock hit. It was
| news to many, including Flock's transparency site, that
| that PD was a user of their services.
|
| So I'm not overly surprised by this.
| birdo-wordo wrote:
| Sounds like it's working as intended. These systems don't
| track people, they provide objective clues and evidence.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| By tracking everyone at all times.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 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.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| You should assume every police cruiser has a plate reader, too.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| Remember, according to Flock's CEO, Deflock is a terrorist
| organization.
| mikece wrote:
| Yes, and according to Steve Ballmer (back in the day) Linux
| Torvalds was a terrorist. People are allowed to say stupid
| things.
| jLaForest wrote:
| People are allowed to say stupid things....and those people
| should be held accountable for the stupid things they say
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Everyone who is not content with the way I do business must
| be a terrorist for sure. o_o
| technol0gic wrote:
| by "say stupid things," you of course mean "tell bald-faced
| lies"
| rl3 wrote:
| The most notable one: _" Developers, developers,
| developers!"_
| burkaman wrote:
| I don't think this is true, I can't even find anyone else
| claiming this happened.
| dspillett wrote:
| 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Lol, sure it is. Ridiculous.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| If you spot missing camera's - Flock or not - you can add them to
| OSM easily with https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance
| culi wrote:
| Everydoor's UI is also quite nice for this. it even lets you
| enter in the orientation quite easily
|
| https://every-door.app/
|
| https://github.com/Zverik/every_door
| slg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| wage theft is a much larger crime
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| police in the US also steal more than robbers, as a factual
| statistic
| baggy_trough wrote:
| This is great, we can see where more cameras need to be added
| around the neighborhood!
| avsavani wrote:
| love this , give me more cameras please , fuck those criminals.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Coming 2028: Dissent is a crime
| drunken_thor wrote:
| 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.
| allthetime wrote:
| UBC campus in Vancouver as well.
| randlet wrote:
| Sudbury is 150k+ people so not exactly tiny in terms of
| Canadian cities (30th most populus).
| glitcher wrote:
| 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.
| doctor_radium wrote:
| 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.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Are they Flock cameras or bog standard CCTV?
| doctor_radium wrote:
| The Lowes cameras are definitely Flock. The look is
| unmistakable. See
|
| https://deflock.org/identify
| dawnerd wrote:
| I contacted them about it too and got the most generic corpo
| pr about them being essential for the safety of their
| employees.
| willis936 wrote:
| Woof. There is one that I basically must drive by everyday close
| to where I live. How can I figure out who is responsible for its
| installation so I can let them know how I feel (and will vote)
| about it?
| qup wrote:
| It's probably your city/police.
|
| I have two cameras in my small town, but I can avoid them, so I
| now go out of my way to cross town.
| NoSalt wrote:
| I wonder how long until the site gets taken down. You know ... to
| protect the children.
| sanufar wrote:
| Jeez there's a few all around my uni and surrounding areas, did
| not know about that at all.
| tmshapland wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think you overestimate the public.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Much prefer camera driven enforcement to cop-on-beat driven
| enforcement.
| saxonww wrote:
| Flock cameras aren't enforcing anything. They collect your
| license plate and distinguishing details of your car. It's just
| car X with plate Y detected at location Z at time T.
|
| Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good
| driving' detection.
|
| You might think that having a constantly-present, objective,
| impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-
| present, subjective, often _not_ impartial beat cop doing that.
| But that 's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that
| 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop,
| without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| None in my area. Time to disperse. Get out of major cities like
| the pandemic promised. Fill in this great country we live in.
| Proliferate the governments surveillance for them.
| LordGrey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The odds are 100% that it will be abused.
| culi wrote:
| Because they already are
| k33n wrote:
| Can you name just one incident of abuse?
| natebc wrote:
| https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-
| government/article29105...
|
| _A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety
| license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her
| new boyfriend's vehicles 228 times over four-plus months
| and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town,
| according to a city official and a report released this
| week by the agency that oversees police certifications._
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Edward Snowden. Everything after that is a no-brainer.
|
| Hell, everything after Room 641A is a no-brainer.
| jp191919 wrote:
| Snowden, a true American patriot.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The only way you could have moved this goal post faster
| is if you had edited your original comment.
| lokar wrote:
| Police in the US very rarely face accountability for
| misconduct.
| debarshri wrote:
| 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.
| dhdaadhd wrote:
| Can you elaborate on true innovators? No shade, but I have a
| hard time conceptualizing what innovation would look like in
| this space.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pibaker wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > the (real) purpose of a system is what it does
|
| I 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.
| butterbomb wrote:
| > Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid
| about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely
| rare act
|
| I thought they were mostly custody style kidnappings anyway.
| pc86 wrote:
| They almost entirely are, 90% plus. And they're incredibly
| rare even including those, which you shouldn't.
| craftkiller wrote:
| Huh, none on the upper west side in NYC. Interesting.
| segmondy wrote:
| Interesting ... the police in this case are claiming to be the
| owners of the camera.
|
| https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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.
| s1gsegv wrote:
| And to think, all it cost was a significant loss of privacy
| nationwide
| mulmen wrote:
| Home Depot didn't have CCTV and loss prevention before Flock?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Wondering what the intersection is with Home Depot cameras and
| ICE?
| unclad5968 wrote:
| 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?
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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?
| jppope wrote:
| So silly question. Flock is making money off of my Name, Image,
| and Likeness can I request compensation for that?
| david_shaw wrote:
| 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."
| waterproof wrote:
| Reminder that at least in Washington state, all images from Flock
| cameras are public data and thus subject to public records
| requests.
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
| andoando wrote:
| Why dont they put up a couple drones up high in the sky
| pilingual wrote:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/camden-nj-homicide...
| buellerbueller wrote:
| All this does is incentivize crime doers to steal someone else's
| license plate first.
| Arubis wrote:
| A potentially nice addition to this map would be your closest
| hardware, paint, craft store, or other spray paint dealership.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| You can bet money theyre selling this data to private companies
| like repo men.
| nocoolnametom wrote:
| 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...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It only gets them deactivated until the state legislature
| "fixes" the "loophole".
| ribosometronome wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is pretty cool. I think I'd want a few more on my block. Can
| an individual request and fund one?
| milkytron wrote:
| Nice. The bike trail to my office and a few grocery stores
| doesn't have any of these.
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| stri8ted wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| stri8ted wrote:
| 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 it's the best I can do for now.
| ergocoder wrote:
| I'm gonna get downvoted for this.
|
| But I'd like cameras in my neighborhood.
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(page generated 2026-03-04 23:00 UTC)