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SparrowMap – Cameras that watch government vehicles
- chaps 1mo agoFun fact: in some municipalities you can FOIA for the GPS records of police vehicles. Here's Chicago Police's. They removed 0-15mph for, erm, privacy reasons.... but it's not the worst. Have a glance: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/hj4jtcag2i9qvl4sj6mg2/AF6c9r7eaZ8TP96JDnYJipk?rlkey=812ti2fs0lcdha3upvvnws8ow&st=f3dj5p9v&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/hj4jtcag2i9qvl4sj6mg2/AF6c9r7...
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- arm32 1mo agoThat's indeed a very fun fact!
- judge2020 1mo agoThe speed limit in neighborhoods is usually 25, so... 0-15mph limiting seems useless? I imagine some level of police <-> home address / general home area is in that data.
- darksim905 1mo agoWhat? Removing 0-15 mph is to remove places where they camp or loiter with the engine on either for tickets, naps, or other purposes.
- chaps 1mo agoRight there's another gotcha with the data. They gave 15-60mph data in :30 minute increments. "This would still identify officers blocks or get within a couple blocks of their home for those with take home cars. Would speeds of 15 miles per hour or more but only pings on the :30 minute mark, so one ping per hour from 2019 until the end of April work for you?" Even gave them this SQL to run to get around that problem but they never got back to me, heh: WITH immobile_pings as ( select count(*), vehicleid, round(xcoord::numeric, 3) as xcoord_rounded, round(ycoord::numeric,3) as ycoord_rounded,date_trunc('day', datetime) as day FROM gps_table WHERE speed = 0 GROUP BY vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded, day having count(*) > 1440), --4 hours day_counts as ( select count(*), vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded from immobile_pings group by vehicleid, xcoord_rounded, ycoord_rounded having count(*) > 15 -- 15 days ) select gps_table.* from gps_table s inner join day_counts i ON i.vehicleid = s.vehicleid AND array[round(s.xcoord::numeric, 3), round(s.ycoord::numeric, 3)] != array[i.xcoord_rounded,i.ycoord_rounded] AND speed > 15; -- 15mph
- protocolture 1mo ago>other purposes. Just say "Stalking their ex partners" its fine we all know about it in 2026.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- lellow 1mo ago{"error": "internal error"}, when trying to open the live map.
- CR1337 1mo agosame here
- VoidWhisperer 1mo agoSeconding this. I wonder if the server got hugged to death by the HN front page
- inigyou 1mo agoI keep saying if it's legal for Flock to make Flock it's legal for anyone else to make Flock.
- angeldimitrov94 1mo agoIt sure would be interesting if suddenly all of the Flock employees coming to work were being constantly watched by a network of crowdfunded private cameras. Might drive home the point of invasion of privacy if its someone other than them watching...them. Or if all of the neighbors of the CEO of Flock suddenly joined some service like this so that everyone could track his activity at all times. I'm sure he'd wouldn't mind the entire world knowing exactly what he or his family are doing always.
- dylan604 1mo agoHow would the video captured from those cameras be used? These people are already driving on the same streets you and I do, so how would they not also be in the Flock footage? If you capture TBs of video footage and nobody sees it, what's the point? Are you going to start sending harassing posts to employees with footage of the car driving by your camera? The anti-flock movement is real, but half baked ideas don't really serve a purpose to actually doing anything. Not sure how I feel about those destroying Flock cameras, but that's action moving the needle a lot further than establishing an entirely new anti-Flock camera network.
- jspank 1mo agoyou don't store TBs of video footage... You process it and store the instances of each object/license plate detection.
- dylan604 1mo agogreat, so now what? who are you giving access to that data that will mean anything? the cops aren't going to do anything with it as it does not pertain to anything within the purview. the only thing I could think that would be done with that information is not good with people showing up to their house or some such.
- judge2020 1mo agoThis is irrelevant. Flock operates on the foundational constitutional model of "Our cameras are in public, there is not an expectation of privacy in public, therefore we can capture anything/everything our camera sees in any way possible" (including LPR logging and even video recording). And thus, so does any other system of recording public activity and processing/storing data collected from it. It quite literally does not matter what people do or don't do with the information. If someone does use the information for something illegal (like stalking) them the police aught to take a police report filed by said Flock employee seriously and perform an investigation within the bounds of the law and constitution.
- NDlurker 1mo agoThis is what I like to see AI used for. Thank you Claude Opus 5
- NDlurker 1mo agoFunny seeing the downvotes when there's always negative comments about vibe coded projects posted on here. Taking a glance at the GitHub, it looks like it was made with Claude over the course of 2 days
- bbor 1mo agoTo the wonderful creators, who will presumably find this thread: did you know that sparrows had at least two full millenia of being associated with lust and depravity, rather than the connotation used here and in the final book of ISOIAF (Game Of Thrones)? Well... now you do! I beg of you to fit an easter egg to this effect somwhere in this site, for us followers of the old ways out there. To get a bit more on-topic: this is a perfect example of the missing scale in HN's "no politics" rule. There are facets of politics that you simply cannot ignore while still being an individually-minded technologist (closest thing this community has to a shared ethos).
- Onplana 1mo agoMost of the cameras are showing offline.
- tamimio 1mo agoAll public servants should have all their info publicly available, some safety measures can be put like some delays or similar, but as the name implies, public servant! Police for example should be watched and they should feel they are actively being watched by the public, also their badge numbers should be available on these maps so you just click and you can report them if needed.
- nickandbro 1mo agoAre the .exe to install a always on computer as part of a open source repo I can verify with a hash? Otherwise I am not going to trust it.
- cure_42 1mo agoIf you don't know how to answer this question yourself, you certainly aren't able to read the source code to determine whether it's trust worthy in the first place, so what does it matter to you?
- nickandbro 1mo agoNvm, just clicked on the link and took me to the GitHub. I guess that’s what I get from skimming the website.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Eye_Is_on_the_Sparrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Eye_Is_on_the_Sparrow https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Eye_Is_on_the_Sparrow https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Eye_Is_on_the_Sparrow I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free, For His eye is on the sparrow, And I know He watches me.
- ImPostingOnHN 1mo agoLink says they send data for non-LEO vehicles, just less data. Why send any at all?
- remopulcini 1mo ago[dead]
- softboyled 1mo agoDark gray on black. Impossible to see...