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Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

my mom lives in small town that only has two roads in/out of town and the police have alprs on those. there's no violent crime there, and all the police department does is traffic (DWI's, speeding and parking tickets, and accidents) and respond to small town crime (noise complaints, stolen bicycle, stray/lost dogs etc). I think the only thing that the alpr has ever caught people for is out of date vehicle registrations - but now the police department wants a flock camera because they are "great crime fighting tools"

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ANPR catches lack of MOT, road tax, and insurance. They also alert on wanted cars.

They are a good thing to have in general, the issue with those things is always data retention and access by authorities. Currently I think that data are retained for 12 months so, for the sake of argument, let's say you commit a serious crime now and only come to the attention of the police in 10 months, well they can still query all of your car's movements at the time of the crime from the ANPR network's database...

> They are a good thing to have in general

Perhaps, but not the way Flock does it. Transparency, oversight, controls - all essentially just missing.

"Disruption" to these people means "try to sell the most legally questionable service possible until we get slapped down by the society we're trying to extract money from."

Oh yes, I agree with that.

my proposal to fix the ALPR issue in general focuses on the information asymmetry. The real reason people hate them is because only government forces have access to them, thus creating an unfair advantage.

My solution to this is to make every ALPR database openly and publicly searchable. It solves every problem with them today.

Government abuse? Well now the people can find out where all the politicans are.

False positives? the data is right there. go ham.

Oh no now the police say THEY dont want to be tracked??? Problem almost solves itself.

If you give the public access to ANPR they're going to spend 30 seconds googling the cops and then they're going to go to town on wives, husbands, exes, stalking victims etc. etc.

Here’s the thing - if your local you know they’re there - and if you’re planning on committing a crime they’re trivial (but inconvenient to bypass). So really they’re just recording the everyday movements of the towns populace “just in case”

> the police have alprs

> there's no violent crime there

Cause and effect, no? /s

The bear tax is working

There was no crime before the alprs, no crime after

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