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.

Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA
alpranalysis.com

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.

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?

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.

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.openstreetmap.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.