48 ms·

This is definitely a good step, however, ALPRs are not going away unfortunately. They have and are and will keep getting deployed by private businesses. They

by mc32 13d ago

This is definitely a good step, however, ALPRs are not going away unfortunately. They have and are and will keep getting deployed by private businesses. They are too valuable for them at this time. The likes of Wal-Mart, etc., will potentially sell information to brokers and so on and some aggregator will resell the data to whomever wants to use the data.

techdmn 13d ago
Any business that puts an ALPR in their parking lot is a business I do not visit.
- alexpotato 13d ago
  How would you know if it's there? I ask rhetorically but I also imagine that at some point there will be an app that tells you and then people will vote with their dollars to the places that don't have them.
  - yesfitz 13d ago
    DeFlock already tracks ALPRs in private businesses' parking lots. https://maps.deflock.org/ https://maps.deflock.org/
    - gruez 13d ago
      How do you know a camera is a ALPR camera? How reliable is the data, is it just random people's unvetted reports?
      - paimapi 13d ago
        https://deflockilm.org/war-driving-for-flock-cameras/ https://deflockilm.org/war-driving-for-flock-cameras/ I know a couple of very tech savvy crews that war-drive and collect data on ALPRs in my city and they were the ones who mapped most of our city back in the day. there's been a big post-50501 DeFlock movement, though, so it's possible that more recent results are lower quality backed by lower subject matter expertise but it's not hard to set-up a good-enough scanner with something like Flock-You: https://github.com/MaxwellDPS/Flock-You-Android https://github.com/MaxwellDPS/Flock-You-Android even then, Flock cameras are visually distinctive compared to the Clearview/Motorola solutions that are more traditionally orb-like or are just straight tube CCTV housing. if you see a long black camera attached to a black pole with a solar panel attached, 99.9% chance you've spotted a Flock camera: https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Flock_Safety_ALPR_Camera_53833285849.jpg https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Flock_Safety_...
      - giancarlostoro 13d ago
        Also, how do you account for cameras that are so well placed that nobody even notices them?
        paimapi 13d ago
        pretty easily - with wifi and BLE scanning. it's not like there's a guy at Flock climbing every pole, sticking in a USB, and then trucking it back to home base https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/detecting-surveillance-cameras-with-the-esp32/ https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/detecting-surveillance-camer...
        giancarlostoro 13d ago
        What if the camera is fully wired? Maybe Flock is only wifi based, but other cameras can be 100% setup with ethernet...
        paimapi 13d ago
        Is that how they work or are you just speculating wildly about things that are easily looked up in a few minutes?
        giancarlostoro 13d ago
        Flock is a new in this market, before Flock there were loads of cameras wired up because wifi was not considered reliable until recent times. I'm asking, how do you detect well placed, subtle wired cameras? My overall point being, these apps are only as good as long as Flock and others don't just go fully hardwired (which before Flock, many were!).
  - mc32 13d ago
    It won’t matter. Slow encroachment. Everyone has learned from Google that slow encroachment gets what you want. Price sensitive folks going to dollar general, wal-mart, etc., are not going to go shop at whole foods (assuming they even differentiate), and for people who go to ikea or Lowe’s for home goods, it’s not like they’re going to drive 30 miles out of their way to avoid ALPRs. We can get pols to not deploy them with public monies, but I think that’s all we can do.
    - cucumber3732842 13d ago
      >We can get pols to not deploy them with public monies, but I think that’s all we can do. If we tighten the 4th through 8th amendment case law to reign in the current wild west that is civil enforcement by holding them to the same standards for data access and imposing of penalties that criminal enforcement is the problem would be a lot smaller because then the tracking would be mostly limited to private interests who simply want to screw you out of your money but you can mostly choose not to do business with or will open up themselves to being undercut if they take too much.
- izacus 13d ago
  Where are you gonna go when everyone has them?
  - techdmn 13d ago
    Interesting question. I'm not sure yet. Insane? The woods? Time may tell.
paimapi 13d ago
I once interviewed for a trucking logistics SAAS vendor who installed cameras every X number of miles along every major highway/interstate to track shipments of freight. their moat was that physical surveillance network that they had already installed, cameras which scanned (like Flock) not just license plates but decals, looked for signals of driver awareness, new scuffs/dents/marks, collected EMF emissions to see if certain safety and satellite features were on, etc now they said they didn't sell their data to LEOs but their founders also literally used to work for the CIA (it was bragged about in the initial interviews) I wouldn't be surprised if companies of that kind are a dime-a-dozen
- tenacious_tuna 13d ago
  The more I hear about how surveillance-at-scale like this is so common the more I think we need systemic privacy legislation to make that kind of monitoring impossible, but I don't know how you'd get it through the American legislature. This, combined with grocery stores coallating your purchases by loyalty program or credit card number, Spotify tracking everything you listen to, smart TVs tracking what you watch... What information _isn't_ available on a random citizen? Combine this with a seemingly constant stream of data breaches on SSNs or photo IDs, it feels impossible to meaningfully protect my own privacy at this point.
  - paimapi 13d ago
    one of the things I cover a lot in the security trainings I do for movement spaces is something I don't hear a lot about in the privacy space atm - and that's active counter surveillance you start small with things like data poisoning, intentional signal creation, etc. that looks like mistagging geos on social media, clipping your favorite BLE tracking device to your indoor/outdoor cat that you also borrow for your own keys, scripts/macros that will randomly click-through ads, etc another idea I had was just using those magnetic bumper stickers to confuse things like Flock cameras in combination with IR/reflective bumper covers since those services tend to profile cars based on a lot more than just the plate - wish this was something I could test but alas, an insider with an ethical backbone has yet to leak their source code

by mc32 13d ago

techdmn 13d ago

Any business that puts an ALPR in their parking lot is a business I do not visit.

alexpotato 13d ago
How would you know if it's there? I ask rhetorically but I also imagine that at some point there will be an app that tells you and then people will vote with their dollars to the places that don't have them.
- yesfitz 13d ago
  DeFlock already tracks ALPRs in private businesses' parking lots. https://maps.deflock.org/ https://maps.deflock.org/
  - gruez 13d ago
    How do you know a camera is a ALPR camera? How reliable is the data, is it just random people's unvetted reports?
    - paimapi 13d ago
      https://deflockilm.org/war-driving-for-flock-cameras/ https://deflockilm.org/war-driving-for-flock-cameras/ I know a couple of very tech savvy crews that war-drive and collect data on ALPRs in my city and they were the ones who mapped most of our city back in the day. there's been a big post-50501 DeFlock movement, though, so it's possible that more recent results are lower quality backed by lower subject matter expertise but it's not hard to set-up a good-enough scanner with something like Flock-You: https://github.com/MaxwellDPS/Flock-You-Android https://github.com/MaxwellDPS/Flock-You-Android even then, Flock cameras are visually distinctive compared to the Clearview/Motorola solutions that are more traditionally orb-like or are just straight tube CCTV housing. if you see a long black camera attached to a black pole with a solar panel attached, 99.9% chance you've spotted a Flock camera: https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Flock_Safety_ALPR_Camera_53833285849.jpg https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Flock_Safety_...
    - giancarlostoro 13d ago
      Also, how do you account for cameras that are so well placed that nobody even notices them?
      - paimapi 13d ago
        pretty easily - with wifi and BLE scanning. it's not like there's a guy at Flock climbing every pole, sticking in a USB, and then trucking it back to home base https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/detecting-surveillance-cameras-with-the-esp32/ https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/detecting-surveillance-camer...
        giancarlostoro 13d ago
        What if the camera is fully wired? Maybe Flock is only wifi based, but other cameras can be 100% setup with ethernet...
        paimapi 13d ago
        Is that how they work or are you just speculating wildly about things that are easily looked up in a few minutes?
        giancarlostoro 13d ago
        Flock is a new in this market, before Flock there were loads of cameras wired up because wifi was not considered reliable until recent times. I'm asking, how do you detect well placed, subtle wired cameras? My overall point being, these apps are only as good as long as Flock and others don't just go fully hardwired (which before Flock, many were!).
- mc32 13d ago
  It won’t matter. Slow encroachment. Everyone has learned from Google that slow encroachment gets what you want. Price sensitive folks going to dollar general, wal-mart, etc., are not going to go shop at whole foods (assuming they even differentiate), and for people who go to ikea or Lowe’s for home goods, it’s not like they’re going to drive 30 miles out of their way to avoid ALPRs. We can get pols to not deploy them with public monies, but I think that’s all we can do.
  - cucumber3732842 13d ago
    >We can get pols to not deploy them with public monies, but I think that’s all we can do. If we tighten the 4th through 8th amendment case law to reign in the current wild west that is civil enforcement by holding them to the same standards for data access and imposing of penalties that criminal enforcement is the problem would be a lot smaller because then the tracking would be mostly limited to private interests who simply want to screw you out of your money but you can mostly choose not to do business with or will open up themselves to being undercut if they take too much.
izacus 13d ago
Where are you gonna go when everyone has them?
- techdmn 13d ago
  Interesting question. I'm not sure yet. Insane? The woods? Time may tell.

paimapi 13d ago

I once interviewed for a trucking logistics SAAS vendor who installed cameras every X number of miles along every major highway/interstate to track shipments of freight. their moat was that physical surveillance network that they had already installed, cameras which scanned (like Flock) not just license plates but decals, looked for signals of driver awareness, new scuffs/dents/marks, collected EMF emissions to see if certain safety and satellite features were on, etc now they said they didn't sell their data to LEOs but their founders also literally used to work for the CIA (it was bragged about in the initial interviews) I wouldn't be surprised if companies of that kind are a dime-a-dozen

tenacious_tuna 13d ago
The more I hear about how surveillance-at-scale like this is so common the more I think we need systemic privacy legislation to make that kind of monitoring impossible, but I don't know how you'd get it through the American legislature. This, combined with grocery stores coallating your purchases by loyalty program or credit card number, Spotify tracking everything you listen to, smart TVs tracking what you watch... What information _isn't_ available on a random citizen? Combine this with a seemingly constant stream of data breaches on SSNs or photo IDs, it feels impossible to meaningfully protect my own privacy at this point.
- paimapi 13d ago
  one of the things I cover a lot in the security trainings I do for movement spaces is something I don't hear a lot about in the privacy space atm - and that's active counter surveillance you start small with things like data poisoning, intentional signal creation, etc. that looks like mistagging geos on social media, clipping your favorite BLE tracking device to your indoor/outdoor cat that you also borrow for your own keys, scripts/macros that will randomly click-through ads, etc another idea I had was just using those magnetic bumper stickers to confuse things like Flock cameras in combination with IR/reflective bumper covers since those services tend to profile cars based on a lot more than just the plate - wish this was something I could test but alas, an insider with an ethical backbone has yet to leak their source code