31–40 of 83 posts
Huh... I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even... I don't like that one bit.
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-camera... > uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250 https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround > A simple Python application to test adversarial noise attacks on license plate recognition syste…
Thanks for the links. I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch. How many of those cars on the roads have I seen before? My hunch is that, on my local journeys, I have seen the majority of cars before, to just see them as generic cars, with none of them special, apart from a few owned by friends and a few idiosyncratic vehicles (tractors, pre-war classic cars and anything else rare). I…
Check out OpenALPR. Tested it out on some traffic footage in my region, pretty much nailed them all including the make and model of the car.
One more reason to love GDPR: this kind of thing is illegal in the EU.
They are used on highways to monitor average speed and in cities to check that no "illegal" cars enter the city. Illegal being ones that don't comply with euronorms anymore.
Here in the UK we also have London's congestion charge. All around the outskirts of London on all the main arterial roads, there are ANPR cameras tracking number plates to fine you, if you have not paid the £15 charge for entering the city. A worrying example of ANPR. I visited my mum one weekend, she lives over 300 miles from where I live on the egde of London. She had a phone call while I was there from the police.…
Or they called your mum because she's your mum and top of the list to call? No creepy additional surveillance required there.
https://www.burtoncopeland.com/news/police-are-watching-your...
Also highly likely doing deep analysis of /every/ journey as predictive policing
"We can use ANPR on investigations or we can use it looking forward in a proactive, intelligence way. Things like building up the lifestyle of criminals - where they are going to be at certain times. We seek to link the criminal to the vehicle through intelligence. Vehicles moving on the roads are open to police scrutiny at any time. The Road Traffic Act gives us the right to stop vehicles at any time for any purpose" - Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and Chair of the ACPO ANPR Steering Group" ( source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... )
Of course when he said "criminals" he meant "criminals and also innocent people"
Huh... I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even... I don't like that one bit.
Could likely be traffic detection cameras mistaken for ALPR.
One way to cross-correlate is to pull 811 records. This map overlays the Deflock data with 811 locations: https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/
Huh... I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even... I don't like that one bit.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that your town is way richer than these nearby cities and has a way higher ratio of police to the kind of crime police want to solve hence the "scraping the bottom of the barrel" behavior.
So much of the policing problem is a result of towns with no real problems hiring a bunch of cops to go after little problems and then these bored cops who have nothing to do wind up doing revenue policing or pervasive fishing, acting as an enforcement arm for the petty civil portions of local government, etc, etc.
Like sure, Detroit or some other city with "real crime" might have a big enough department to harbor a rogue drug unit or whatever but at least your average beat cop is well fed enough on "real crime" they don't need to engage in bad behavior to meet quotas.
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims — Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X. https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
Reminder to archive all of these posts by people affiliated with the project for when the inevitable ultimate enshittification happens and they attempt to backpedal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ANPRs are very popular and common in the EU. More so than in the US, even.
The linked new articles talk about some private company selling camera access to law enforcement. I don't think that's a popular setup in the EU, EU law enforcement/traffic authorities seems more likely to run the cameras themselves.