41–50 of 60 posts
The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily a…
The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily a…
I can't wait for the day when Flock's "proactive AI" flags the way you are driving or your vehicle movements as suspicious and alerts LE to just ... "check in on you". Or when they enable the mics in their devices to just start recording your conversations with your friend in a public place and does the same. "AI didn't like what you were talking about, so alerted the local PD".
This is currently an epidemic. Drivers are targeted for “random” checks by police for a number of non-falsifiable factors (e.g. the evergreen “your license plate light was out…huh, looks fine now”) that overwhelmingly correlate with driver income and race.
That’s not whataboutism; I am genuinely not sure if ALPR/automated policing systems stand to make that situation worse or better. Are Flock and friends likely to be abused in the same way that human police traffic stop reasons are?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't wait for the day when Flock's "proactive AI" flags the way you are driving or your vehicle movements as suspicious and alerts LE to just ... "check in on you". Or when they enable the mics in their devices to just start recording your conversations with your friend in a public place and does the same. "AI didn't like what you were talking about, so alerted the local PD".
> alerts LE to just ... "check in on you". This is currently an epidemic. Drivers are targeted for “random” checks by police for a number of non-falsifiable factors (e.g. the evergreen “your license plate light was out…huh, looks fine now”) that overwhelmingly correlate with driver income and race. That’s not whataboutism; I am genuinely not sure if ALPR/automated policing systems stand to make that situation worse o…
Flock's founders belief is that he wants to eliminate all crime (literally) with Flock.
So in his eyes, false positives are inherently acceptable, and preferable to false negatives.
And I feel that (actually, I know that, though I wasn't in Sales, but I did work at Flock) one of their selling points to agency is almost a "whitewashing" of such practices. "Oh, our PD wasn't targeting anyone, we were just acting on the recommendations of the Flock surveillance system".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. All the Flock cameras around me are stationed around the entrances to Lowe's parking lots.
Lowe's and Home Depot both seem to be hubs for their cameras. I only know of one in my rural area and it's at the Lowe's entrance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get it while it's hot, cuz it's already illegal in some states, and will be in more soon! You will be tracked and you will be happy about it.
Flock data retention is defaulted to 30 days, but can vary up to a year or longer depending on the terms of the municipality contract.
I wonder what would happen to these if you put a bunch of TV screens showing random faces at various camera locations. Essentially creating 10s of thousands of face scans per minute at each location until their database fills up and their facial recognition runs out of CPU cycles. Also maybe throw in some randomized license plate numbers and a TPMS transmitter to make it even worse. Nothing illegal, just putting some…
Flock doesn't do facial recognition.
Same author talked about adversarial license plates that trick these cameras with a sequence of black blocks, discussed here in original form [1]. He is interested in breaking both the plate detection (ideal) and character recognition (good). The examples are pretty cool looking. [1]: https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ?&t=1428
The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily a…
The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily a…
I am not anti ALPR. They do have merits on flagging things like stolen vehicles and human trafficking. What I do dislike is a private company owning up the entire market share and has little to no obligation to behave. Why can't cities hire good software developers to create custom solutions that are safe and secure rather than paying a startup thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Austin City Council spent 1.2 MIL…
https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/12/california-road...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of a sticker like in the video make a stencil and spray diluted mud through it. Plausible deniability!
Are you also going to spray your car with mud too? Going to have a hard time explaining a spotless car that only has mud on the license plate.