I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.
Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK. This means that you can easily get swept up in a police dragnet because someone has stolen your car's identity.
Since the genie is out of the bottle, when it comes to ALPRs in the United States, I'd rather just have all the data publicly available. If the cops, data brokers, and insurance companies can see it I should be able to as well.
I should be able to see the comings and goings of law enforcement, elected officials, etc, if they can see mine.
Alternatively, lock it away behind judicial oversight. Make the cops get a warrant. Criminalize companies collecting the data from offering it in any manner other than by the order of a judge.
I feel the same way about tracking cell phones, publicly-owned surveillance cameras, privately-owned surveillance cameras that are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement, and, in general, any dragnet surveillance available to law enforcement. If it's available to law enforcement and not being conducted on an individual basis under a judicial order (or, heck, even just probable cause) I think it should be available to the public, too.
"But stalkers!"
Tough. That's the price we have to pay for keeping law enforcement in check. Either adapt or take this power away from law enforcement.
I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of responsibility, so you should be scrutinized when you do it.
That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.
I've seen this done before by journalists requesting license plate reader data but it's another nail in the coffin of anonymity. Dare I say unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no escape. In television I've seen talk about masks and garments that help prevent this, but I think it's a zero sum game. You will be tracked. You will be photographed, profiled, analyzed and that data is likely sold to the highest bidder and it's only accelerating.
It's interesting that you go through life thinking "no one would ever do that" with regard to various circumstances, yet discover people do those things.
These ALPR companies are evil. If a car manufacturer sells your data or a big box store uses AI in ways you disagree with you can just not purchase from those companies. It can be much more difficult to move to a new town where they may then decide to put these things. I know of one town where it is impossible to drive without hitting an ALPR. What a prison.
Here is a list of things that have been or could be done:
- wrong vehicle identified and stopped at gunpoint
- sacramento sheriff shared LP data with Texas in case pregnant people visited
- police chief stalked his ex
- a mad president could unreasonably declare martial law and send the national guard in to the Atlanta office to take over the command center (if you take the license plate off: how many silver Audi A4s are there in Palo Alto?)
- a foreign state actor could surreptitiously infiltrate their servers and discover patterns that help them if they declare war against the US
- the data will be leaked (high likelihood eventually) and you can find out all kinds of behaviors. It would be fair game for insurance companies.
It violates the 4th amendment. A governement cannot just track innocent people everywhere they go. They sell it as "we aren't giving tickets, we are only looking for bad guys" but the above incidents (gunpoint, sheriff, stalking ex) show otherwise. But what concerns me is not the local police, it is the last three potential situations. And you can't opt out unless you take ubers or bike I guess.
Please donate to the Institute for Justice. They have a case in Virginia (surprised it wasn't mentioned) and I am confident they will succeed in taking this to the Supreme Court. They recently won a civil asset forfeiture case and they have successfully argued cases like DC's gun ban before the supreme court. (If you think guns are bad, fine, but like ALPRs it was a violation of the US constitution) ij.org
I would have less of a problem with the constant surveillance if they would make it required by law to inform me any time someone looks at the data. One of the things that makes me really wary of all this surveillance is that it is too easy for people to look.
If they knew that every time they looked I would know about it, they wouldn't look so much. Similarly to how people are much less stalky on LinkedIn and Instagram because they know that the other person gets notified when they look.
Twelve of them around a high density shopping center is perfectly reasonable.
Just one at the entrance of a neighborhood is severe overreach.
I don't mind the idea of building a surveillance state within certain parameterized boundaries, but once you are in a residential setting these things feel like military incursion. Homeowners can already opt-in to video doorbells, security cameras on their properties, etc.
Home Depot & law enforcement don't need a 500-mile diameter security perimeter around each retail store to catch the guy stealing Milwaukee products. The cameras in the parking lot and leading up to the freeway should give you enough room to play with unless you are vastly incompetent at basic police work.
I entered the United States the other day from Mexico at BWI without even showing my passport. I don't know how they verified my identity, but I presume it was a camera, because the agent looked in a computer for a few seconds, then waved me through... :/
Good to know the state knows me and isn't even bashful about it...
> In just a few taps and clicks, the tool showed where a car had been seen throughout the U.S. A private investigator source had access to a powerful system used by their industry, repossession agents, and insurance companies. Armed with just a car’s plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted.
If this type of surveillance is concerning to you, please look at advocating against it at a local level. Thomas Ptacek [1] has experience and seems very willing to help out. He recently provided a really helpful comment regarding reining in a Flock install in his city. [2]
And as has been mentioned a couple other places in this discussion, please contribute to mapping out license plate readers in OpenStreetMap at https://deflock.me. Ideally someone will create a routing engine which with an option to avoid all known ALPR's while generating a route.
"Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle."
I have always avoided bumper stickers and custom license plates for more anonymity. I have a ham radio license and decided not to get a license plate with my callsign on it because people could easily Google that and find out my name and address. I had always just thought about other drivers in these cases, not law enforcment surveillance!
It talks about Flock branded surveillance in several places, then the news site itself asks for donations with this tagline "Thanks for joining our flock!". Short double-take on that donation area for me.
Most cars already emit RF signals for WiFi, Bluetooth and 5G. These can be fingerprinted along with the physical attributes to increase accuracy.
I’m in support of better investigative tools and stricter governance. I’m not worried that my car location would lead to a false arrest- that is like being afraid of lighting striking.
I was subjected to two illegal traffic stops in NJ because my Indiana plate was "unregistered" when in fact they just don't share data with the vendor running the ALPR systems the town cops use. These companies need to be sued into submission.
They are growing and showing up everywhere, but you never hear about them in terms of real innovation, just helping build the surveillance state. Combine this with cloud based doorbell cameras and it seems like someone is always watching.
Dang. I've had a fantasy of painting several fake license plates all over the back of my hatchback to help confound these cameras, but:
'Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a "vehicle fingerprint" for every car or truck'
So in just the same way that ad blockers and other anti-surveillance tech actually make your browser stand out, obfuscating your license plate would also make you stand out.
Effective and reliable law enforcement is a very fast way to go from a low trust society to a high trust society. You can leave your expensive valuables unattended and be certain they won’t be taken. Cameras result in higher solve rates, which results in lower crime rates, which results in even higher solve rates.
Meanwhile, in the Bay Area (one of the most economically productive regions of the world) even attempted burglary is functionally not a crime: if there is no footage, nothing was taken, it’s not an active crime, and the value of your smashed window is under some threshold, police will direct you to fill out a form online which will almost certainly not result in an investigation or arrest. Worse yet, if you report to insurance, you will be punished in the form of higher premiums.
Holy carp! I've just started noticing these cameras in my neighborhood a couple of months ago and was wondering where they were coming from. They have no stickers or names or identifications of any kind. They are installed everywhere; in the Home Depot parking lot, across the street from the local high school, in the park.
Interestingly they seem to be taking the place of the old, bulky, tow behind camera rigs that used to be in several of these locations. Those other devices were large trailer rigs with flashing blue lights and camera's up on a tower.
This is just one reason why it's important to not talk to police. They might ask you if you were in Cityville on some particular date, and maybe you'd forgotten. So you said no. But then it comes out that there's footage of you in town, and now that can of worms is open.
Don't FOIA requests charge you for the manhours it took, or is it just the data transfer cost? It might vary by state now that I think of it. I wonder how much these cost.
Saying these requests constitutes a felony is ludicrous, hopefully the judge sees the case as a bad prank.
There's an episode on the TV show Elementary, where an Uber type company employee was using a tracking device to see where riders were going so as to blackmail them if any stops seemed sketchy. Do police officers ever let their lives get out of control and get into financial straights?
We think of public surveillance as a sort of crime prevention, and in a certain ways it is. However, the possible abuse of it is mind boggling.
> That generates a “vehicle fingerprint” for every car or truck, which none of the agencies I FOIA’d would provide me.
I hope there's also litigation for this given it is also public record when it's being purchased with tax dollars. Especially if they're just asking for the identifications of their own vehicle. It seems similar to denying me a copy of their record of my actual fingerprint.
These systems are also likely to get replaced or downsized in favor of relying on data from _self driving vehicles_.
Waymo and et al are touted for making our lives easier (load of marketing bs), but really will make it more difficult.
edit: and they get to double dip — users paying to use and install their product, and selling that data back to the user and LE and intelligence communities.
What if someone takes their license plates off and makes a fake temporary paper one, the kind you put in the back window when you get a new car? Not permanently but if you wanted to go do something illegal and not be tracked.
Can the LPR pick those up?
It seems to be a controversial stance, but; I have no issue with this capability in the right hands.
I would immediately surrender such information either way, in the interests of the community - say for a missing child?
These capabilities should have well defined intent/objectives and transparent controls to protect the privacy of individuals to which are out scope.
With all the above said; it’s been proven time and time again that even with clear intent - the purpose of these systems mutates (ie between governments). Said governments then wonder why public trust is lacking?
(Example; see Australian Government customer ISP DNS requirements)
I asked our Sheriff who is in charge of the local deployments in our county whether they could, in theory, enforce curfews if the governor implemented an emergency order, and he said "yes I guess we could in that case".
"It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse."
What? Who has an expectation of privacy 'even in public spaces'? You're in public with a serialized mode of transportation (license plate) that requires a state-issued license to operate. Why would you expect 'privacy' in public?
Cadillac and Tesla emulate panopticonic cells, which resolve the presence of an external observer. CCTV footage is confined to local area networks that is pulled from LRP time-stamp headers. Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) on a narrow-band, Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) protocol can identify vehicle fragments, meta-data, from dynamic time-stamp servers, like "that is a red Tesla."
I asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car
(cardinalnews.org)651 points by bookofjoe 28 March 2025 | 519 comments
Comments
Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK. This means that you can easily get swept up in a police dragnet because someone has stolen your car's identity.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...
I should be able to see the comings and goings of law enforcement, elected officials, etc, if they can see mine.
Alternatively, lock it away behind judicial oversight. Make the cops get a warrant. Criminalize companies collecting the data from offering it in any manner other than by the order of a judge.
I feel the same way about tracking cell phones, publicly-owned surveillance cameras, privately-owned surveillance cameras that are "voluntarily" offered to law enforcement, and, in general, any dragnet surveillance available to law enforcement. If it's available to law enforcement and not being conducted on an individual basis under a judicial order (or, heck, even just probable cause) I think it should be available to the public, too.
"But stalkers!"
Tough. That's the price we have to pay for keeping law enforcement in check. Either adapt or take this power away from law enforcement.
That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.
These ALPR companies are evil. If a car manufacturer sells your data or a big box store uses AI in ways you disagree with you can just not purchase from those companies. It can be much more difficult to move to a new town where they may then decide to put these things. I know of one town where it is impossible to drive without hitting an ALPR. What a prison.
Here is a list of things that have been or could be done:
- wrong vehicle identified and stopped at gunpoint
- sacramento sheriff shared LP data with Texas in case pregnant people visited
- police chief stalked his ex
- a mad president could unreasonably declare martial law and send the national guard in to the Atlanta office to take over the command center (if you take the license plate off: how many silver Audi A4s are there in Palo Alto?)
- a foreign state actor could surreptitiously infiltrate their servers and discover patterns that help them if they declare war against the US
- the data will be leaked (high likelihood eventually) and you can find out all kinds of behaviors. It would be fair game for insurance companies.
It violates the 4th amendment. A governement cannot just track innocent people everywhere they go. They sell it as "we aren't giving tickets, we are only looking for bad guys" but the above incidents (gunpoint, sheriff, stalking ex) show otherwise. But what concerns me is not the local police, it is the last three potential situations. And you can't opt out unless you take ubers or bike I guess.
Please donate to the Institute for Justice. They have a case in Virginia (surprised it wasn't mentioned) and I am confident they will succeed in taking this to the Supreme Court. They recently won a civil asset forfeiture case and they have successfully argued cases like DC's gun ban before the supreme court. (If you think guns are bad, fine, but like ALPRs it was a violation of the US constitution) ij.org
Edit: spelling, formatting
If they knew that every time they looked I would know about it, they wouldn't look so much. Similarly to how people are much less stalky on LinkedIn and Instagram because they know that the other person gets notified when they look.
Twelve of them around a high density shopping center is perfectly reasonable.
Just one at the entrance of a neighborhood is severe overreach.
I don't mind the idea of building a surveillance state within certain parameterized boundaries, but once you are in a residential setting these things feel like military incursion. Homeowners can already opt-in to video doorbells, security cameras on their properties, etc.
Home Depot & law enforcement don't need a 500-mile diameter security perimeter around each retail store to catch the guy stealing Milwaukee products. The cameras in the parking lot and leading up to the freeway should give you enough room to play with unless you are vastly incompetent at basic police work.
Good to know the state knows me and isn't even bashful about it...
> In just a few taps and clicks, the tool showed where a car had been seen throughout the U.S. A private investigator source had access to a powerful system used by their industry, repossession agents, and insurance companies. Armed with just a car’s plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
And as has been mentioned a couple other places in this discussion, please contribute to mapping out license plate readers in OpenStreetMap at https://deflock.me. Ideally someone will create a routing engine which with an option to avoid all known ALPR's while generating a route.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777
I have always avoided bumper stickers and custom license plates for more anonymity. I have a ham radio license and decided not to get a license plate with my callsign on it because people could easily Google that and find out my name and address. I had always just thought about other drivers in these cases, not law enforcment surveillance!
I’m in support of better investigative tools and stricter governance. I’m not worried that my car location would lead to a false arrest- that is like being afraid of lighting striking.
They are growing and showing up everywhere, but you never hear about them in terms of real innovation, just helping build the surveillance state. Combine this with cloud based doorbell cameras and it seems like someone is always watching.
'Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a "vehicle fingerprint" for every car or truck'
So in just the same way that ad blockers and other anti-surveillance tech actually make your browser stand out, obfuscating your license plate would also make you stand out.
Is anyone watching the watchers? Who is policing the police? What checks and balances do we have?
Meanwhile, in the Bay Area (one of the most economically productive regions of the world) even attempted burglary is functionally not a crime: if there is no footage, nothing was taken, it’s not an active crime, and the value of your smashed window is under some threshold, police will direct you to fill out a form online which will almost certainly not result in an investigation or arrest. Worse yet, if you report to insurance, you will be punished in the form of higher premiums.
Interestingly they seem to be taking the place of the old, bulky, tow behind camera rigs that used to be in several of these locations. Those other devices were large trailer rigs with flashing blue lights and camera's up on a tower.
Saying these requests constitutes a felony is ludicrous, hopefully the judge sees the case as a bad prank.
We think of public surveillance as a sort of crime prevention, and in a certain ways it is. However, the possible abuse of it is mind boggling.
I hope there's also litigation for this given it is also public record when it's being purchased with tax dollars. Especially if they're just asking for the identifications of their own vehicle. It seems similar to denying me a copy of their record of my actual fingerprint.
Waymo and et al are touted for making our lives easier (load of marketing bs), but really will make it more difficult.
edit: and they get to double dip — users paying to use and install their product, and selling that data back to the user and LE and intelligence communities.
Here are the statistics on Roanoke VA's flock cameras for the last 30 days.
Oh yeah and police surveillance something.
I would immediately surrender such information either way, in the interests of the community - say for a missing child?
These capabilities should have well defined intent/objectives and transparent controls to protect the privacy of individuals to which are out scope.
With all the above said; it’s been proven time and time again that even with clear intent - the purpose of these systems mutates (ie between governments). Said governments then wonder why public trust is lacking?
(Example; see Australian Government customer ISP DNS requirements)
Welcome to the future.
What? Who has an expectation of privacy 'even in public spaces'? You're in public with a serialized mode of transportation (license plate) that requires a state-issued license to operate. Why would you expect 'privacy' in public?