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Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

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Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#341

Post by eightysixfour »

Manuel_D wrote: post #334
eightysixfour wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, up until the mid to late 2000s, the majority of ALPRs were mounted on the police cruisers. Even when they moved on to installing them in fixed locations, they had two major limitations: • There were few of them • The databases were managed by the jurisdiction To my exact point, by increasing the number of readers and SaaS-ifying the process to enable jurisdictions to opt-in to information sharing, you have…

Motorola built the first national ALPR database in the mid 2000s. Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.

You keep ignoring my only point.

> Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.

Scale and level of effort involved matter. How many cameras were reporting to the Motorola database in 2000? 2010? Flock today?

How easy was it to type in “white Chevrolet Tahoe at [intersection]” until you see the one you want, get its license plate and run through the rest of the database?

Who was able to do that? How easy was it?

The sum of many small changes can create a meaningfully different result that we need to evaluate different than the thing that came before.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#342

Post by assimpleaspossi »

antonvs wrote: post #332
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are trying to apply a few internet reports to everyone and everything instead of the reality that it rarely happens and is typically a one off thing. Quit applying online things and TV so-called "news" to the world and follow what's happening around you instead.

No. There's a reason that transparency, oversight, and controls are important in government. It allows citizens to detect abuse of power, it allows checks and balances, it improves government decisions, it protects citizens' freedom. The issue is not that people are being recorded in public, the issue is people are being recorded in public and the data is being correlated nationwide and accessed by government officia…

I would re-post what I just wrote but that didn't work the first time so I won't post it again.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#343

Post by CircuitSeuss »

john-h-k wrote: post #317
CircuitSeuss wrote: post #212

Seeing commenters defending privatized mass surveillance tech in 2026 is crazy.

It’s public shared land. I think surveilling this is fine

Imagine if your neighbor walked past your house every day and recorded your property with their phone camera. Imagine thirty strangers did that every day. Imagine being unable to walk more than two blocks out of your neighborhood before passing a random stranger standing up in a crows-nest on a telephone pole with a zoom lens camera photographing you and your kids and taking notes so they could sell your behavioral data to law enforcement and advertising agencies. Imagine several hundred strangers concurrently following you around your grocery store and silently monitoring your shopping habits. It’s okay though, these are public spaces, and you shouldn't expect to have power of consent over who is watching you.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#344

Post by Manuel_D »

eightysixfour wrote: post #341
Manuel_D wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motorola built the first national ALPR database in the mid 2000s. Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.

You keep ignoring my only point. > Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact. Scale and level of effort involved matter. How many cameras were reporting to the Motorola database in 2000? 2010? Flock today? How easy was it to type in “white Chevrolet Tahoe at [intersection]” until you see the one you want, get its license plate and run through the rest of the database?…

It is, and always was as straightforward as typing in the license plate number. Do you think indexing a bunch of 7vcharacter strings was beyond the capability of databases in the 2000s?

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#345

Post by everforward »

tptacek wrote: post #168
Cider9986 wrote: post #105

They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change. There's been over 70[1] documented wins. Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them. [1] https://de…

They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis…

> normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.

The effectiveness is dramatically oversold. This has literally happened to me. Called 911 midway through the theft, cops pulled it up on Flock, the best they could tell me was "they went towards the highway" (no shit, Sherlock).

I saw the parts on marketplace a week later (definitely mine, unique staining), 2 hours after they were listed and called it in. The PD where the parts are wouldn't do anything unless my PD called, my PD said the officer in charge was on vacation so they can't do anything until he's back.

Take a wild guess who hasn't heard anything back. This should be their ideal situation; they got called mid-robbery, and someone else located the parts afterwards. If they can't solve that with Flock, lack of information is not the holdup here.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#346

Post by tptacek »

everforward wrote: post #345
tptacek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis…

> normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in. The effectiveness is dramatically oversold. This has literally happened to me. Called 911 midway through the theft, cops pulled it up on Flock, the best they could tell me was "they went towards the highway" (no shit, Sherlock). I saw the parts on marke…

I completely agree with you about the effectiveness, or rather, I do if you stipulate a community that has a problem with curbing cars for innocent drivers (many communities don't recognize that as a real harm and will look only at the top line interdiction numbers).

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#347

Post by akerl_ »

afpx wrote: post #313
tptacek wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Chaps! Sorry, I write the way I write. "They" are public bodies operating ALPR devices; in the main, municipal police forces, though obviously other public bodies (like the Illinois State Police) operate them as well. The antecedent of the first "that" was "the use of cameras to detect cars with politically disfavored bumper stickers". I am, yes, dismissing the concern that ALPRs are being used to detect cars wi…

[flagged]

Is the point of the site to build reputation, or to share opinions and discuss topics?

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#348

Post by cmxch »

Cider9986 wrote: post #105

They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change. There's been over 70[1] documented wins. Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them. [1] https://de…

And criminals notice fast that the neighborhoods that don’t have them are easy pickings.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#349

Post by doc_ick »

tptacek wrote: post #218
StayHuman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to push back on this in my local community, two things I have found, below. Hopefully helpful to others. 1) I tried posting on Craigslist's "Community" section, in a simple attempt to reach out and connect with others who may be concerned. The posts were automatically blocked before even being published on the site. I tried multiple versions of this (i.e. with links and without, with pictures and without, etc.…

I don't know where you live, but if you lived in Chicagoland the advice for how to engage on this would be easy: there are 1-4 (depending on your muni) Facebook groups where all the meaningful policy discussion happens. Hold your nose and log into Facebook and look.

Or you could log in here, or write newspapers about it, or make a nice Oreo pie and make sure everyone knows where every flock of materials is

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#350

Post by antonvs »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #342
antonvs wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There's a reason that transparency, oversight, and controls are important in government. It allows citizens to detect abuse of power, it allows checks and balances, it improves government decisions, it protects citizens' freedom. The issue is not that people are being recorded in public, the issue is people are being recorded in public and the data is being correlated nationwide and accessed by government officia…

I would re-post what I just wrote but that didn't work the first time so I won't post it again.

Not everyone can be a systems thinker, you shouldn't feel too bad. But you should probably refrain from commenting about situations where you can't see beyond your own nose.
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