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Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

haveibeenflocked.com

81–90 of 251 posts

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#81
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.) In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.

Ah thanks. Permanent rental it is then. :)

That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable.

You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL

Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.

The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just work backwards. Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT. I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data. If you had paid fancy tools,…

Sure, and so what? You can look up people on Accurint without license plates. Depending on what kind of account you have, you can just search by a zip code, or a state with no further identifiers. What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?

Pairing IPs to persons?

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and so what? You can look up people on Accurint without license plates. Depending on what kind of account you have, you can just search by a zip code, or a state with no further identifiers. What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?

Pairing IPs to persons?

You can just get an API which does that and skip the middle steps?

Or even skip the API part and just buy that data in bulk. Or just collect it from a variety of freely leaked databases.

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#84
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? To the extent they're a private company you're even less likely to get access to records from Flock ALPR cameras.

Just because the records created on behalf of the government are held by a private enterprise doesn't mean they aren't government records.

Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.

eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.

I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#85
post #2

I love these kinds of sites, since they're indistinguishable from honeypots. Sure, have my license plate and the information that I'm worried about being watched.

Reminds me of the (legit) form to claim compensation for a privacy leak.

Put in your name, address, phone number, dob, ssn and bank details - we will post you a cheque for $2.50

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#86
post #70
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flock Safety" is a company that makes "ALPR" cameras (automated license plate recognition, in reality they go far beyond just reading license plates), they've been getting a lot of attention recently because people are worried about privacy and abuse. There's a bunch of articles about them here: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/

I would also recommend Benn Jordan's YT channel, he has a couple of videos covering flock cameras. His latest one is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY edit: grammar

I love Benn Jordan. If you liked this one, go check out the one where he stores a JPEG inside of a living bird.

https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?si=K_TGBR6FNpjI0qFk

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#89

I mean, we already had PRISM, why is anyone acting like this is a big deal?

It's a big deal even if it's been happening for a while. It should not be something we shrug our shoulders to and move on. These are stepping stones to a greater police state.

Re: Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

#90
post #10

Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete. But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".

Rule 1. Do not comply in advance. Do not accept it as inevitable. Do not give away your power without friction.
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