Deflock hits 100k ALPRs Mapped in USA | Hacker News Reader

Deflock hits 100k ALPRs Mapped in USA

deflock.org

240 pointspilingual75 comments

Nice to see some pushback in the most egregious abuses of privacy. I wonder why we are getting this with Flock but not seeing the same with private security cameras such as Ring, pervasive tracking of mobile devices by carriers and apps, and internet browser tracking. Is it just that there's a direct personal benefit with those devices, and people view the trade-off as being worth it?

> Is it just that there's a direct personal benefit with those devices, and people view the trade-off as being worth it?

I think that's mostly it. Basically since Flocks only use is for the systematic tracking of people for use by police and government agencies, it's a lot easier to get people to turn against it. There's just no upside to them that any individual would ever benefit from.

It's sad because if/when Flock dies the death of deserves, the software/infrastructure will likely just get sold off and reapplied to some other deployment scheme like Ring quietly forgoing the big Superbowl Ad.

I don’t think people realize that these devices can even be used that way. I talk with people outside of the tech scene frequently, and they are routinely surprised when I tell them about this sort of capability. The ring doorbell Super Bowl commercial about finding lost dogs was a genuine shock to people! I think there’s a degree of visibility you need to get people’s attention on an issue, and it’s just difficult to see a doorbell as a threat for the average person.

I so want to push back that all this is too little too late, because the system ,though still distributed , is effectively in place already. But.. I also don't want to be the old guy telling kids not to rebel. After all, being young and thinking ( knowing! ) one can change the world, is what being young human is all about. FWIW, it may well be their version of decss, ows and so on.

On the other hand, come to think of it, despite OWS being broken up by fancy new approaches ( rumor has it, Walls Street got spooked enough to see what effective methods can be employed given that Pinkerton approach would have been frowned upon then ), I don't recall FBI marking the participants in any special way ( please correct me if I am missting anything ).

With a nationwide effort in swing to dismantle corporate surveillance, the follow up is to pass legislation state by state that prohibits its implementation in the future. Federal legislation on this matter is unlikely to occur until sometime after midterms, and so state legislation is the path to success in the interim.

We voted out the cameras locally, the feds just installed them at every nook and cranny they had available. Turned out, there was a lot of federal property, so it was back to square one.

Regime change is coming, its harm reduction until then.

Are you sure about that? Seems pretty shameless and determined to bend all the rules to stay in power, I surely hope the change is coming though.

Dem advantage heading into midterms is highest in 20 years [1]. I am hopeful if democracy is directly attacked during the upcoming election cycle, the attempt will be contained, but agree it remains to be seen and you should have an exit plan if democracy fails.

Mental model: I am sure of nothing. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Better to have a plan and not need it than need it and not have it. Hope alone is not a strategy.

[1] https://emersoncollegepolling.com/april-2026-national-poll/

I was thinking regime change along the lines of you gonna get old and croak and be replaced in the voting both by some millenial/Z/alpha that will not repeat your mistake of trying to give the government arbitrary power because their whole lives all they have ever seen is that power come back around in various forms to screw the people.

As you like to quote, "demographics is destiny".

It will take 10-20 years of election cycles for the cohort replacement you mention to take place. By regime change, I mean the current administration is disempowered.

To note, we did not get here from arbitrary power; we got here due to partisan failure of checks and balances in Congress and SCOUTS. But, to your point, I believe changes will be made to prevent this failure scenario in the future.

There are a host of issues that the dems are better on (assuming one agrees on what better means), but I don't think they're particularly better on this issue. One can point to pro-privacy outliers on both sides, but we're not likely to get one of them as the final candidate in 2028.

A Democrat has won almost every election since the presidential election [1] [2]. It is a referendum on this administration imho, and based on all available data and evidence, I expect it to continue.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990619 (citations)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46864405 (citations)

I expect Dems to be better on privacy in this context ("We don't need ALPRs because privacy is more important than faux threats conjured up to sell corporate surveillance to the masses for institutional shareholder returns") because you're more likely to be fear driven as a Republican/conservative (and therefore, support invasion of privacy via ALPRs despite facts and statistics around the risk) due to a larger amygdala (where fear processing takes place) [3] and amygdala–BNST connectivity [4], but of course some Dems will disappoint on this policy topic. You might even be able to suss out confidence in policy implementation using photos of candidates [5], which can predict political orientation (and therefore, brain structure).

[3] Kanai R, Feilden T, Firth C ... Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults Current Biology, 2011; 21, 677-680 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017

[4] Pedersen WS, Muftuler LT, Larson CL. Conservatism and the neural circuitry of threat: economic conservatism predicts greater amygdala-BNST connectivity during periods of threat vs safety. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2018 Jan 1;13(1):43-51. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx133. PMID: 29126127; PMCID: PMC5793824.

[5] Kosinski, M., Khambatta, P., & Wang, Y. (2024). Facial recognition technology and human raters can predict political orientation from images of expressionless faces even when controlling for demographics and self-presentation. American Psychologist, 79(7), 942–955. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001295

>the most egregious abuses of privacy

wait until you hear about EU's EES

do you really believe your biometrics being checked once when you enter a continent as a foreigner is the same as being videotaped at every moment in your own country as a citizen?

I think both are bad and there's no guarantee they are not keeping their eyes on me all the time

The problem is that you're not being videotaped at every moment. You're trying to make one sound worse than it is, and downplaying the other one. Two things can be bad at once.

Ring is dead near me. Everyone had Ring doorbells until someone went around with a hammer and fucked them all up.

Surely one of the cameras saw who it was...?

balaclava

It didn't happen

I'm picturing someone dressed up as MC hammer blasting hammer time on a speaker

Honey, did you order a ski mask and a hammer because someone is delivering them now according to the cam... nevermind.

Wish that same person would do something about obnoxious digital billboards

There is some push on that too but Flock is sponsored by people's taxes, while ring is someone's personal choice.

Dont forget about Waymo and similar. As much surveillance as flock.

Does Waymo track individuals for businesses and governments?

If so, I'll stop using them. If they just happen to need cameras, that's fundamentally different.

It's not much of a stretch to think they'd sell the data or be compelled to given the NSA and data brokers exist.

Bugs me no end that my latest upstairs neighbor (I've been here for 15 years) has a ring on their door which means I have to be in front of it every time I go in & out my own door.

It doesn't matter how thoughtful you are, someone else will be thoughtless for you.

Ring did get some pushback when they advertised the "pet finding" feature that folks realized meant would allow anybody to be found.

But overall, being tracked by your _own_ device feels different than being tracked by somebody else's device. Especially when taxpayer dollars are being used for that other device.

It's not just inputs/sensors but also outputs. It seems like every public space is abused with bright obnoxious digital billboards now the cost is cheaper and cheaper.

wait until satellite constellations would start displaying ads ... as well as there is huge still unused space on the face of the Moon :)

Flock could easily get around this by paying people to put them on their own property. Then what?

Put energy into legislation. Ring and Nest already do the same thing.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/ring-reveals-they-give...

It's ironic seeing this here since Flock is YCombinator company.

I dunno if it is ironic. Most of us recognize that technology itself is a tool. It can be used in any number of ways including ones in which some portions of the population may disagree with.

I don't know about that, nothing about their pitch indicated anything but what their technology is currently used for.

I will give you a weird, but current, example. TSLA ( and virtually all companies that center on Musk as its director -- in the original sense of the word before HR title inflation took it down ) may say one thing about what the plan for the tech is, but, even occasional review of their positioning shows that the "what their technology is currently used for" is in near constant flux. Honestly, the fact that his investors keep rewarding it is beyond me.

Surveillance and privacy invasion is profitable, so not ironic at all.

How is this data storage even legal? I mean having cameras out that will sound an alarm if one of N specific wanted cars pass by is one thing. But do these cars just store stuff for later use and abuse? Who approved that?

They aren’t and no one legitimately did. This is extrajudicial surveillance state stuff

The 100k figure is an overestimate by a few percent. The OpenStreetMap data for ALPRs is pretty good, but there is some duplication. I (recently) programmatically identified ~2.5k such instances. https://pickpj.github.io/Mapping/FIock/similar.html It has openstreetmap links attached for those who want to help fix the data.

Nice work all. But am quite unhappy with their new map. Doesn’t work with my hardened machine with webgl off or my old phone. For some obscure reason, the button to try the “legacy” map (from last month) does not come up most of the time. So several times recently the site has been inaccessible to me.

Every single one of these should have its lens destroyed. Make it expensive to repair.

this is great. I mean I'm all for the argument in the abstract. my commute is 2.5 miles one way, and I get tagged 20 times in each direction. that kind of brings it home.

I see all the Lowe’s in my area are Flock’ed up.

Home Depot from now on.

near me it’s the Hone Depot, not Lowes, that has the flocks

(It's Home Despot and Blowe's)

Finally, someone else who calls them Home Despot and Blowe's!

You mean those trailers with the blue flahsy lights on them? Those are LiveView cameras. I don't think Flock is trying to advertise where all their cameras are, hence the reason for the map.

Speed cameras next. They’re just revenue generators and part of a safetyism Trojan horse for surveillance.

They definitely slowed drivers down in San Francisco: data was released proving it.

Source? My understanding is that speeding cameras and flock cameras are different in the SF application at least.

My response was about speed cameras not flock cameras. They added them on Chavez, Ocean, and a few other places.

Slowing drivers isn’t a good thing. It’s just making lives worse by adding travel time when people could move faster. But my point remains - speed cameras are a backdoor surveillance method. They can be subpoenaed.

Speed cameras save lives. It's best when they're paired with:

- good publicity (drivers know that speed cameras exist)

- density (high chance of passing a speed camera)

- enforcement of penalties (if fines can be ignored then they lose their deterrent effect)

- portable (so you don't know where they are ahead of time)

They also enable mass surveillance and they also unnecessarily reduce quality of life. No one talks about the time lost to artificially low speed limits. But they do matter.

Speed cameras enable efficient enforcement of existing speed limits. They don't require 'artificially low speed limits'.

Speed cameras don't have to enable mass surveillance. The oldest ones are detect a speeding object and take two photos at a fixed interval. Cars that aren't speeding aren't recorded.

> No one talks about the time lost to artificially low speed limits

Do they talk about the time lost to RTCs?

How much time do you "lose" due to speed limits?

think of me as the stupidest person on the planet and explain to my how a flock camera is violation of privacy

It builds a map of your life without you knowing. Thousands of cameras snapping your plate over months means someone can piece together that you go to a certain church, a certain doctor, a certain bar, or a certain person's house. You never agreed to that, and you can't see it happening.

There's no warrant and often no real oversight. Normally police need a judge's permission (a warrant) to track someone. Flock can let them search where your car has been without that step, which is why people call it "warrantless surveillance." And it's been misused: several towns like Oshkosh and Appleton canceled their Flock contracts over privacy concerns and several incidents of misuse by law enforcement.

You don't control the data, and the rules can change. This is a big one. When Brookings agreed to install the cameras, the city was promised it would own the data, that retention would be temporary, and that Flock would not sell the information, with the contract stating Flock does not own and shall not sell customer data. Then in February 2026 Flock rewrote its terms, granting itself a perpetual, irrevocable license to use and disclose all customer data, and deleted the promise not to sell that data. So data collected about you can outlive the promises that were made when the camera went up.

https://www.wbay.com/2026/05/12/local-communities-cancel-flo... https://www.brookingsregister.com/2026/05/22/letter-to-the-e...

> Thousands of cameras snapping your plate

And another thing to note is that it goes way beyond just reading license plates. It's building a profile and lets them search based on it. It captures things like bumper stickers and what the people in the car look like.

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