4 ms·

Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)

141 points by walterbell 1y ago

helterskelter 1y ago
If you don't want to take the risk destroying or spray painting the lense or solar panels of these devices, a picket sign installed right in front of it works pretty well while probably not getting you sent to jail. You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss.
- stef25 1y ago
  Probably why they are mounted 4 meters high
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    I have this 35 Watt laser I scored off aliexpress, it runs off 24V. I wonder...
    - gadders 1y ago
      I did always wonder if the sort of green laser pointer that could light matches would wreck the sensors. The biggest use of these cameras in the UK is in car parks so that predatory parking companies can fine you £60 for going a nano-second over the time you paid for.
      - inetknght 1y ago
        > I did always wonder if the sort of green laser pointer that could light matches would wreck the sensors. It absolutely can.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      I would be interested if anyone is prototyping vehicle mounted lidar with machine vision discrimination. https://www.google.com/search?q=lidar+ccd+damage https://www.google.com/search?q=lidar+ccd+damage
    - anon_cow1111 1y ago
      For anyone who's actually wondering about this, 100-200mw is extremely damaging to camera sensors(also eyes) and doesn't cause birds to burst into flames from a stray reflection. Most cheap pen-size laser pointers sold as "5mw" are actually 100+. As a general rule, if you can see the beam brightly when doing star pointing it's somewhere in this range (but if Parent's laser is one of those sealed-tube Co2 lasers, it'll never touch the camera sensor itself because the beam doesn't go through glass. Might crack it after a couple seconds though)
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        It's a green stacked diode laser. Collimation is poor but at a couple of meters any kind of sensor will be slag in a few seconds.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss This isn't effective protest action unless you generate media that debates the downsides of the cameras. (If it just gets branded as vigilantism, you may wind up increasing support for them.)
  - jahnu 1y ago
    This is excellent advice and a nice (theoretical at least) example of why protests and actions that don't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > why protests and actions that doesn't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors The point is to think through (and shape) the consequences. Trash bag is nice but leaves interpretation to the viewer. Trash bag with a sign is better, but the ambiguity of the action together with the conciseness requirement of physical signage makes for a difficult combo. Trash bag with a QR code highlighting (depending on your town's partisan lean, of course) when "authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois" [1], or that Flock Safety "is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches" [2] is better still. (Best would be something that concisely conveys the problem while blocking the sign. I'm not having anything readily come to mind...Lady Liberty holding her palm to the camera is kitsch.) Still, just raising awareness is table stakes. Ideally such activity comes ahead of a petition drive, or town hall where a series of plants raise objections to the company. [1] https://www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-searched-license-plate-cameras-nationwide-for-a-woman-who-got-an-abortion/ https://www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-searched-license-plate-c... [2] https://www.404media.co/license-plate-reader-company-flock-is-building-a-massive-people-lookup-tool-leak-shows/ https://www.404media.co/license-plate-reader-company-flock-i...
baggy_trough 1y ago
Great resource for planning where to buy a house!
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
What we need is a leak of a Flock database. Ideally, due to a security fuck-up by someone other than the jurisdiction that installed them. (Company itself, or another city doing Flock's warrantless search feature.) Having granular location data for an entire town's license plates should still be creepy and damaging enough that it gets these things torn out and replaced with something more thoughtfully designed. (Side note: Flock Safety has paid Mercury nearly half a million dollars in lobbying fees [1]. One of the two lobbyists they hired also lobbies for Tencent [2]. The other for Alibaba [3]. In case you're talking to your local, state and/or federal electeds.) [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2025&id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis... [2] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summary?cycle=2025&id=Y0000048135L https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summa... [3] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summary?cycle=2025&id=YX000060978L https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summa...
- heroprotagonist 1y ago
  That didn't work for cellular location data, it probably won't work for license plate readers.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > didn't work for cellular location data The fact that the data would be local is why I suspect the response would be different.
  - HWR_14 1y ago
    Did I miss a large leak of cellular location data? I would have guessed that would make headlines.
    - heroprotagonist 1y ago
      Yeah, historically a lot of the aggregators of cellular location data have had huge security issues. One of them even had a demo page open to the internet that just had a 'Has consent?" checkbox. Showed me my own location within two blocks without any real validation of consent. No options from the vendor to disable this. Contacting T-Mobile just gets you a PO Box you can mail a letter to. An article on one of them from years ago: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsmart-leaked-location-data-for-customers-of-all-major-u-s-mobile-carriers-in-real-time-via-its-web-site/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...
x______________ 1y ago
Crowd-sourced license plate reader map; browse map, report a camera.
Rodmine 1y ago
[flagged]
- john01dav 1y ago
  > If you find an answer to this, you will understand what happens now. Is there some answer that you're expecting people to find?
littlestymaar 1y ago
One more reason to love GDPR: this kind of thing is illegal in the EU.
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  Not if the governments do it (strictly speaking, that'd be "data collected for the core functioning of the service").
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    It still looks like there are more data controls in the EU for ANPRs (number plate versus license plate) [1]. (EDIT: Nvm.) [1] https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/automatic-number-plate-recognition-anpr_1?locale=en https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/automatic-number-plate-...
    - beagle3 1y ago
      This is a list of datasets, not of restrictions, it seems? When they say “ Information captured at the Roadside Automatic Number Plate Recognition system. Only vehicles matching specified criteria (e.g. expired test) are captured.” - meaning, that’s what in the dataset. But they have to read every plate to check its expiration status etc. they just don’t put it in this dataset. But also … how is ANPR in Europe PII? Is there a public/semi-public database that connects plates to owners?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - einarfd 1y ago
        In Norway the plates to owner database is public, and you can either use the free government service or for profit ones. To look them up. Basically ownership of vehicles is not viewed as private information. So it isn’t covered by privacy legislation. But tracking where the car is, that is covered. That doesn’t stop, speed traps reading car plates, nor parking tracking with cameras. But that info can’t be sold for other purposes.
Trias11 1y ago
I wonder if these things read and decode QR codes on cars? Then you may stick QR code on bumper pointing to web page you control and track when something hits the page.
reify 1y ago
Here in the UK we also have London's congestion charge. All around the outskirts of London on all the main arterial roads, there are ANPR cameras tracking number plates to fine you, if you have not paid the £15 charge for entering the city. A worrying example of ANPR. I visited my mum one weekend, she lives over 300 miles from where I live on the egde of London. She had a phone call while I was there from the police. They were asking to speak to me! They said that they were concerned that there were two cars with the same registration number plate. Could I check that my car was still outside my mums home. They had stopped another car, not the same make as mine, in London with the same number plate. The police said that the other car had been involved in criminal activity. I can only assume that they tracked my car over 300 miles with ANPR, checked out who I was, then did a family association check, found my mum's contact details and called to speak to me. I also assume that they must have already been to my home address and found I was not home.
- nuthje 1y ago
  Or they called your mum because she's your mum and top of the list to call? No creepy additional surveillance required there.
  - octo888 1y ago
    They do plenty of creepy surveillance if your vehicle is flagged on the central database (eg for having been near a protest) https://www.burtoncopeland.com/news/police-are-watching-your-every-move-roads/ https://www.burtoncopeland.com/news/police-are-watching-your... Also highly likely doing deep analysis of /every/ journey as predictive policing "We can use ANPR on investigations or we can use it looking forward in a proactive, intelligence way. Things like building up the lifestyle of criminals - where they are going to be at certain times. We seek to link the criminal to the vehicle through intelligence. Vehicles moving on the roads are open to police scrutiny at any time. The Road Traffic Act gives us the right to stop vehicles at any time for any purpose" - Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and Chair of the ACPO ANPR Steering Group" ( source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... ) Of course when he said "criminals" he meant "criminals and also innocent people"
walterbell 1y ago
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-cameras/ https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-camera... > uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250 https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround > A simple Python application to test adversarial noise attacks on license plate recognition systems (see my PlateShapez demo) and create an output dataset to train more effective attack models.. small, hardly-noticeable, random gaussian shapes to confuse AI license plate readers "Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices" (250 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698
- Theodores 1y ago
  Thanks for the links. I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch. How many of those cars on the roads have I seen before? My hunch is that, on my local journeys, I have seen the majority of cars before, to just see them as generic cars, with none of them special, apart from a few owned by friends and a few idiosyncratic vehicles (tractors, pre-war classic cars and anything else rare). I could be wrong with most cars being totally new to me, maybe not on the road outside my door, but on the big road that my road joins on to. My use case is as a cyclist. So that Raspberry Pi will need to be carried somehow. There aren't too many cyclists around in my neck of the woods, therefore, even though I might see all cars as generic boxes, their drivers might see me as 'there is that stupid cyclist again', hopefully to give me space on the road. We all have to get along on the roads and I don't want any conflict, mostly because I will need to use the same roads again and I wouldn't want to meet someone on the road after some silly road-rage type of incident. Therefore, knowing how many cars are actually new to me would be useful to know. This applies to so much else, even the birds in the garden, where I can't tell one sparrow from another. It would be great to know which of them are residents and which ones are from out of town. Birds don't wear number plates though.
  - stef25 1y ago
    > I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch Check out OpenALPR. Tested it out on some traffic footage in my region, pretty much nailed them all including the make and model of the car.
donatj 1y ago
Huh... I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even... I don't like that one bit.
- uyzstvqs 1y ago
  Could likely be traffic detection cameras mistaken for ALPR.
  - tsbischof 1y ago
    Possible, but there are plenty of instances of that sort of layout. One way to cross-correlate is to pull 811 records. This map overlays the Deflock data with 811 locations: https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/ https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/
- potato3732842 1y ago
  > Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that your town is way richer than these nearby cities and has a way higher ratio of police to the kind of crime police want to solve hence the "scraping the bottom of the barrel" behavior. So much of the policing problem is a result of towns with no real problems hiring a bunch of cops to go after little problems and then these bored cops who have nothing to do wind up doing revenue policing or pervasive fishing, acting as an enforcement arm for the petty civil portions of local government, etc, etc. Like sure, Detroit or some other city with "real crime" might have a big enough department to harbor a rogue drug unit or whatever but at least your average beat cop is well fed enough on "real crime" they don't need to engage in bad behavior to meet quotas.
  - bgentry 1y ago
    I get the temptation to attribute the popularity of these systems to lazy police with nothing better to do, but from personal experience there’s more to it. I live in a medium sized residential development about 15 minutes outside Austin. A few years ago we started getting multiple incidents per month of attempted car theft where the thieves would go driveway to driveway checking for unlocked doors. Sometimes the resident footage revealed the thieves were armed while doing so. In a couple of cases they did actually steal a car. The sheriffs couldn’t really do much about it because a) it was happening to most of the neighborhoods around us, b) the timing was unpredictable, and c) the manpower required to camp out to attempt to catch these in progress would be pretty high. Our neighborhood installed Flock cameras at the sole entrance in response to growing resident concerns. We also put in a strict policy around access control by non law enforcement. In the ~two years since they were installed, we’ve had two or three incidents total whereas immediately prior it was at least as many each month. And in those cases the sheriffs could easily figure out which vehicles had entered or left during that time. I continue to see stories of attempted car thefts from adjacent neighborhoods several times per month. I totally get the privacy concerns around this and am inherently suspicious of any new surveillance. I also get the reflexive dismissal of their value. In this case it has been a clear win for our community through the obvious deterrent factor and the much higher likelihood of having evidence if anything does happen. Our Flock cameras do not show on the map here, btw.
scottydelta 1y ago
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims — Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X. https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955 https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  Lmao, hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic Reminder to archive all of these posts by people affiliated with the project for when the inevitable ultimate enshittification happens and they attempt to backpedal.
- Y_Y 1y ago
  don't bite the feed that feeds you
stef25 1y ago
Here in Belgium the contract for these cameras on highways was given to a family run business who charged nothing at all for the hardware and installation in exchange for a decent cut of every fine that's issues with them. They're financially very healthy.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  That's disgusting.
unglaublich 1y ago
This is quite tame compared to tracking cookies on the web!
- horseradish7k 1y ago
  it is easier to clear your cookies than get a new license plate.
  - slumberlust 1y ago
    Sure is, but they don't only rely on your cache for fingerprinting.
crimsoneer 1y ago
Maybe I'm less sensitive to this coming from the UK, where we're quited to ANPR, but this feels pretty okay to me. When you drive a giant hunk of metal, you accept a higher burden of government surveillance.
- tsbischof 1y ago
  Why accept surveillance and tracking without a narrow and well-defined scope? It is one thing to track cars for estimating traffic velocity, it is another entirely to create a national database of all locations any given individual has been seen, with minimal oversight to the purpose for collecting and using that data.
  - WindyMiller 1y ago
    > all locations any given individual has been seen This is perhaps another reason people in the UK might be more chill about ANPR: we're smaller and incrementally less carbrained, so to describe ANPR as tracking "all locations any given individual has been seen" sounds like wild hyperbole. (Of course all our police forces are frothing at the mouth to roll out facial recognition everywhere they can, so kicking off a bit more about surveillance might not be a bad idea...)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ck2 1y ago
Unless you don't carry a phone, they know where you are at all times anyway If not realtime, then historically, without a warrant, for any reason they want Not saying that's okay but it's what's been happening for decades and well known/documented They even know every single person who visited Epstein's Island via cellphone tracking
stn8188 1y ago
Skimming the map, I see many listed are in parking lots for Home Depot and Lowe's. I assume that's because of high dollar items and common theft issues? I'm wondering if those cameras are specifically operated by this Flock company, or others as well.
- infecto 1y ago
  They are in my experience flock only. They are financially a smart decision for those types of businesses. They one get some analytics tracking out for the box(which a Walmart might already be doing themselves) but more importantly they bridge local police with know shoplifters. As soon as the identified car enters the parking lot both the police and Walmart know.
- tsbischof 1y ago
  It is specifically Flock. For a bit of data, check around page 110 of this report on data sharing between camera operators: https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2025/07/23/JCSO_Agency_Sharing.pdf https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2025/07/23/JCSO_Agency_S...
infecto 1y ago
I have very mixed feelings about this tech. On one hand there does feel like a deteriorating society, more petty crime, I almost never see police anymore. Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets. Lots of street racing during the day on busy streets and just general chaos. Without a doubt education and parenting is a root problem for most of these issues. The idea of people able to simple track cars is elegant and can be a huge multiplier of effectiveness for police. I am generally not opposed to it. The problem as we know is there really is not good safety guards on it. Too many law enforcement have used it improperly. The root there is this idea that the thin blue line exists, police are under educated, trained and paid. It’s a very mixed feeling for myself.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets. I do think public sentiment would swing hard against this type of widespread tracking if we could see laws enforced more regularly. I live in a low crime city, but even I’m growing frustrated with the flagrant violation of basic laws. We take the kids to nearby park where it’s becoming common for maybe 1 in 100 cars to speed 50-60mph down the adjoining road (twice the speed limit). 1 in 100 doesn’t sound like a lot but it means i see it several times during a single visit. They don’t slow down or stop at the crosswalks. Only 10 years ago, I remember speed patrols on this road once a week. They would nab anyone flagrantly blowing crosswalks or going significantly over the speed limit. It had a huge effect and you rarely saw violations. Now: Nothing. I was talking to my wife and we couldn’t remember the last time there was an officer doing speed checks on that road, despite the constant problems and being adjacent to the biggest park around. The basic laws and regulations just don’t seem to matter any more. Even the trails we like to hike where dogs are only allowed on-leash is full of off-leash dogs. There was a time when you risked getting random a ticket if you were caught with an off-leash dog, but now it’s not a possibility anyone even thinks about. The spot checks and ticket writing previously kept everyone honest, but now it’s rare to see a dog on leash. My friend’s dog (on leash) was attacked by someone’s off leash dog recently and they barely wrestled it away. A visiting friend of mine was bitten by an off leash dog while walking, though it was a small dog she could shake off. It’s still all so bizarre to me that any enforcement of the rules seemingly disappeared overnight. I know it’s nothing relative to the people living in areas where shoplifting is rampant or you have to fear violent crime, but I think the root cause is similar: A complete lack of visible enforcement emboldens people to ignore them. When the problem becomes widespread, public opinion about invasive enforcement and monitoring becomes more welcoming.
fhdkweig 1y ago
A map can only tell you where the fixed position cameras are. Both police cars and tow truck companies are scanning every plate on every car they drive past and share that info with each other.
fcpguru 1y ago
i feel like with AR glasses and phones and dash cams etc there just isn't going to be a place without ALPR readers going 24/7 soon?
- tsbischof 1y ago
  I will be surprised if there is not a startup in the coming years that pays you to run a surveillance mining app that shares data as a way to subsidize the cost of the hardware. The surveillance state equivalent of ads
cozzyd 1y ago
I think we need a parallel, citizen-run ALPR network that could e.g. send out warnings when e.g. ICE vehicles drive by. Surely what's good for the goose is good for the gander?
Vitamin_Sushi 1y ago
Maybe I'm still bitter about having my car being hit twice, both times being a hit-and-run which I was basically 100% on the hook for, but maybe I'm okay with this (provided it's only on taxpayer funded roads only)? Driving, at least in the US, is a privilege and you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy out in public anyway.
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  Sounds like you're weighing a momentary convenience against an unbounded downside. It's true that we have no expectation of privacy on the roads as individuals, but one thing that both ML researchers and evil dictators will agree on is that quantity has a quality all its own.
  - Vitamin_Sushi 1y ago
    Traffic enforcement is abysmal in my city (I'm sure in many other places too), and our ever-increasing car insurance premiums reflect that. If there's a better way to enforce traffic laws or punish drunk drivers rear ending me and running off, then I'm all ears. Right now, the only other alternative I'm reading is letting the problem get worse.
onetokeoverthe 1y ago
[dead]
bokohut 1y ago
Fifteen years ago now in Dec 2010 I made a post on my now defunct blog about ALPR and I updated it for a few years. My experiences with LE along side my technical skillset had me 'finding' things. I wont post the entire blog entry text since it is too long for this format but I did include some relevant entries to the point of how long this has really been occurring. Links are very old so YMMV. ========= Dec 1 2010 Automated License Plate Readers - ALPR So tonight someone we will call the "suspect" robbed a liquor store with a shotgun and the Delaware State Police were in action with ALPR technology. It was stated by a witness that the "suspect" was seen getting into a late 90's model civic or small hatchback so thus the ALPR call. At the same time troopers were going door to door in the area checking on the well fair of residence in the area. Aside from a helicopter, K9 tracking, and what was at least 15 law enforcement officers from various local jurisdictions setup in a layered perimeter around the area the suspect evaded. I have included a mp3 segment of the Automatic License Plate Recognition vehicle convo and a swf clip showing a trooper setup at an exterior perimeter point. UPDATE: 08/07/2011 Finally the word is out as they only had it for years. Link with video http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20110807/NEWS02/108070345/License-plate-software-stirs-privacy-debate http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20110807/NEWS02/108070... UPDATE2: 12/02/2011 National general news on ALPR http://www.privacylives.com/washington-post-eyes-turn-to-license-plate-readers/2011/11/21/ http://www.privacylives.com/washington-post-eyes-turn-to-lic... UPDATE3: 12/08/2011 Have enough bank? - then you can even buy it http://www.avigilon.com/products/licenseplaterecognition/ http://www.avigilon.com/products/licenseplaterecognition/ UPDATE4: 07/31/2012 Getting some more press http://www.aclu.org/automatic-license-plate-readers-threat-americans-privacy http://www.aclu.org/automatic-license-plate-readers-threat-a... Are they watching you? http://www.aclu.org/maps/automatic-license-plate-readers-are-you-being-followed http://www.aclu.org/maps/automatic-license-plate-readers-are... UPDATE5: 07/16/2012 Tracking you illegally? http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57594179/aclu-warns-of-mass-tracking-through-license-plate-scanners/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57594179/aclu-warns-of-m... UPDATE6: 04/07/2015 Gone and done it - Even with all the Ed Snowden press now they are going national with ALPR. https://cdt.org/blog/government-keeps-its-eyes-on-the-road-with-invasive-license-plate-reader-program/ https://cdt.org/blog/government-keeps-its-eyes-on-the-road-w...

141 points by walterbell 1y ago

If you don't want to take the risk destroying or spray painting the lense or solar panels of these devices, a picket sign installed right in front of it works pretty well while probably not getting you sent to jail. You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss.

stef25 1y ago
Probably why they are mounted 4 meters high
- jacquesm 1y ago
  I have this 35 Watt laser I scored off aliexpress, it runs off 24V. I wonder...
  - gadders 1y ago
    I did always wonder if the sort of green laser pointer that could light matches would wreck the sensors. The biggest use of these cameras in the UK is in car parks so that predatory parking companies can fine you £60 for going a nano-second over the time you paid for.
    - inetknght 1y ago
      > I did always wonder if the sort of green laser pointer that could light matches would wreck the sensors. It absolutely can.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    I would be interested if anyone is prototyping vehicle mounted lidar with machine vision discrimination. https://www.google.com/search?q=lidar+ccd+damage https://www.google.com/search?q=lidar+ccd+damage
  - anon_cow1111 1y ago
    For anyone who's actually wondering about this, 100-200mw is extremely damaging to camera sensors(also eyes) and doesn't cause birds to burst into flames from a stray reflection. Most cheap pen-size laser pointers sold as "5mw" are actually 100+. As a general rule, if you can see the beam brightly when doing star pointing it's somewhere in this range (but if Parent's laser is one of those sealed-tube Co2 lasers, it'll never touch the camera sensor itself because the beam doesn't go through glass. Might crack it after a couple seconds though)
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      It's a green stacked diode laser. Collimation is poor but at a couple of meters any kind of sensor will be slag in a few seconds.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> You may even be able to get away with ziptying a trashbag over it without too much fuss This isn't effective protest action unless you generate media that debates the downsides of the cameras. (If it just gets branded as vigilantism, you may wind up increasing support for them.)
- jahnu 1y ago
  This is excellent advice and a nice (theoretical at least) example of why protests and actions that don't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > why protests and actions that doesn't necessarily "fix" an issue directly are important and not (necessarily) an ego trip for the protestors The point is to think through (and shape) the consequences. Trash bag is nice but leaves interpretation to the viewer. Trash bag with a sign is better, but the ambiguity of the action together with the conciseness requirement of physical signage makes for a difficult combo. Trash bag with a QR code highlighting (depending on your town's partisan lean, of course) when "authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois" [1], or that Flock Safety "is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches" [2] is better still. (Best would be something that concisely conveys the problem while blocking the sign. I'm not having anything readily come to mind...Lady Liberty holding her palm to the camera is kitsch.) Still, just raising awareness is table stakes. Ideally such activity comes ahead of a petition drive, or town hall where a series of plants raise objections to the company. [1] https://www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-searched-license-plate-cameras-nationwide-for-a-woman-who-got-an-abortion/ https://www.404media.co/a-texas-cop-searched-license-plate-c... [2] https://www.404media.co/license-plate-reader-company-flock-is-building-a-massive-people-lookup-tool-leak-shows/ https://www.404media.co/license-plate-reader-company-flock-i...

baggy_trough 1y ago

Great resource for planning where to buy a house!

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

What we need is a leak of a Flock database. Ideally, due to a security fuck-up by someone other than the jurisdiction that installed them. (Company itself, or another city doing Flock's warrantless search feature.) Having granular location data for an entire town's license plates should still be creepy and damaging enough that it gets these things torn out and replaced with something more thoughtfully designed. (Side note: Flock Safety has paid Mercury nearly half a million dollars in lobbying fees [1]. One of the two lobbyists they hired also lobbies for Tencent [2]. The other for Alibaba [3]. In case you're talking to your local, state and/or federal electeds.) [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2025&id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis... [2] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summary?cycle=2025&id=Y0000048135L https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summa... [3] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summary?cycle=2025&id=YX000060978L https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summa...

heroprotagonist 1y ago
That didn't work for cellular location data, it probably won't work for license plate readers.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > didn't work for cellular location data The fact that the data would be local is why I suspect the response would be different.
- HWR_14 1y ago
  Did I miss a large leak of cellular location data? I would have guessed that would make headlines.
  - heroprotagonist 1y ago
    Yeah, historically a lot of the aggregators of cellular location data have had huge security issues. One of them even had a demo page open to the internet that just had a 'Has consent?" checkbox. Showed me my own location within two blocks without any real validation of consent. No options from the vendor to disable this. Contacting T-Mobile just gets you a PO Box you can mail a letter to. An article on one of them from years ago: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsmart-leaked-location-data-for-customers-of-all-major-u-s-mobile-carriers-in-real-time-via-its-web-site/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...

x______________ 1y ago

Crowd-sourced license plate reader map; browse map, report a camera.

Rodmine 1y ago

[flagged]

john01dav 1y ago
> If you find an answer to this, you will understand what happens now. Is there some answer that you're expecting people to find?

littlestymaar 1y ago

One more reason to love GDPR: this kind of thing is illegal in the EU.

NitpickLawyer 1y ago
Not if the governments do it (strictly speaking, that'd be "data collected for the core functioning of the service").
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  It still looks like there are more data controls in the EU for ANPRs (number plate versus license plate) [1]. (EDIT: Nvm.) [1] https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/automatic-number-plate-recognition-anpr_1?locale=en https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/automatic-number-plate-...
  - beagle3 1y ago
    This is a list of datasets, not of restrictions, it seems? When they say “ Information captured at the Roadside Automatic Number Plate Recognition system. Only vehicles matching specified criteria (e.g. expired test) are captured.” - meaning, that’s what in the dataset. But they have to read every plate to check its expiration status etc. they just don’t put it in this dataset. But also … how is ANPR in Europe PII? Is there a public/semi-public database that connects plates to owners?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - einarfd 1y ago
      In Norway the plates to owner database is public, and you can either use the free government service or for profit ones. To look them up. Basically ownership of vehicles is not viewed as private information. So it isn’t covered by privacy legislation. But tracking where the car is, that is covered. That doesn’t stop, speed traps reading car plates, nor parking tracking with cameras. But that info can’t be sold for other purposes.

Trias11 1y ago

I wonder if these things read and decode QR codes on cars? Then you may stick QR code on bumper pointing to web page you control and track when something hits the page.

reify 1y ago

Here in the UK we also have London's congestion charge. All around the outskirts of London on all the main arterial roads, there are ANPR cameras tracking number plates to fine you, if you have not paid the £15 charge for entering the city. A worrying example of ANPR. I visited my mum one weekend, she lives over 300 miles from where I live on the egde of London. She had a phone call while I was there from the police. They were asking to speak to me! They said that they were concerned that there were two cars with the same registration number plate. Could I check that my car was still outside my mums home. They had stopped another car, not the same make as mine, in London with the same number plate. The police said that the other car had been involved in criminal activity. I can only assume that they tracked my car over 300 miles with ANPR, checked out who I was, then did a family association check, found my mum's contact details and called to speak to me. I also assume that they must have already been to my home address and found I was not home.

nuthje 1y ago
Or they called your mum because she's your mum and top of the list to call? No creepy additional surveillance required there.
- octo888 1y ago
  They do plenty of creepy surveillance if your vehicle is flagged on the central database (eg for having been near a protest) https://www.burtoncopeland.com/news/police-are-watching-your-every-move-roads/ https://www.burtoncopeland.com/news/police-are-watching-your... Also highly likely doing deep analysis of /every/ journey as predictive policing "We can use ANPR on investigations or we can use it looking forward in a proactive, intelligence way. Things like building up the lifestyle of criminals - where they are going to be at certain times. We seek to link the criminal to the vehicle through intelligence. Vehicles moving on the roads are open to police scrutiny at any time. The Road Traffic Act gives us the right to stop vehicles at any time for any purpose" - Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and Chair of the ACPO ANPR Steering Group" ( source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... ) Of course when he said "criminals" he meant "criminals and also innocent people"

walterbell 1y ago

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-cameras/ https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-camera... > uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250 https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround > A simple Python application to test adversarial noise attacks on license plate recognition systems (see my PlateShapez demo) and create an output dataset to train more effective attack models.. small, hardly-noticeable, random gaussian shapes to confuse AI license plate readers "Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices" (250 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698

Theodores 1y ago
Thanks for the links. I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch. How many of those cars on the roads have I seen before? My hunch is that, on my local journeys, I have seen the majority of cars before, to just see them as generic cars, with none of them special, apart from a few owned by friends and a few idiosyncratic vehicles (tractors, pre-war classic cars and anything else rare). I could be wrong with most cars being totally new to me, maybe not on the road outside my door, but on the big road that my road joins on to. My use case is as a cyclist. So that Raspberry Pi will need to be carried somehow. There aren't too many cyclists around in my neck of the woods, therefore, even though I might see all cars as generic boxes, their drivers might see me as 'there is that stupid cyclist again', hopefully to give me space on the road. We all have to get along on the roads and I don't want any conflict, mostly because I will need to use the same roads again and I wouldn't want to meet someone on the road after some silly road-rage type of incident. Therefore, knowing how many cars are actually new to me would be useful to know. This applies to so much else, even the birds in the garden, where I can't tell one sparrow from another. It would be great to know which of them are residents and which ones are from out of town. Birds don't wear number plates though.
- stef25 1y ago
  > I am interested in creating my own number plate reader to scratch an itch Check out OpenALPR. Tested it out on some traffic footage in my region, pretty much nailed them all including the make and model of the car.

donatj 1y ago

Huh... I live in a small town a ways out of the downtown area, so I thought "they're probably only on the highway where I've seen cameras"... Nope, basically every intersection with a stoplight near me is listed as having four nodes. Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even... I don't like that one bit.

uyzstvqs 1y ago
Could likely be traffic detection cameras mistaken for ALPR.
- tsbischof 1y ago
  Possible, but there are plenty of instances of that sort of layout. One way to cross-correlate is to pull 811 records. This map overlays the Deflock data with 811 locations: https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/ https://alprwatch.org/flock/utilities/
potato3732842 1y ago
> Much more densely than nearby larger cities on the map even I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that your town is way richer than these nearby cities and has a way higher ratio of police to the kind of crime police want to solve hence the "scraping the bottom of the barrel" behavior. So much of the policing problem is a result of towns with no real problems hiring a bunch of cops to go after little problems and then these bored cops who have nothing to do wind up doing revenue policing or pervasive fishing, acting as an enforcement arm for the petty civil portions of local government, etc, etc. Like sure, Detroit or some other city with "real crime" might have a big enough department to harbor a rogue drug unit or whatever but at least your average beat cop is well fed enough on "real crime" they don't need to engage in bad behavior to meet quotas.
- bgentry 1y ago
  I get the temptation to attribute the popularity of these systems to lazy police with nothing better to do, but from personal experience there’s more to it. I live in a medium sized residential development about 15 minutes outside Austin. A few years ago we started getting multiple incidents per month of attempted car theft where the thieves would go driveway to driveway checking for unlocked doors. Sometimes the resident footage revealed the thieves were armed while doing so. In a couple of cases they did actually steal a car. The sheriffs couldn’t really do much about it because a) it was happening to most of the neighborhoods around us, b) the timing was unpredictable, and c) the manpower required to camp out to attempt to catch these in progress would be pretty high. Our neighborhood installed Flock cameras at the sole entrance in response to growing resident concerns. We also put in a strict policy around access control by non law enforcement. In the ~two years since they were installed, we’ve had two or three incidents total whereas immediately prior it was at least as many each month. And in those cases the sheriffs could easily figure out which vehicles had entered or left during that time. I continue to see stories of attempted car thefts from adjacent neighborhoods several times per month. I totally get the privacy concerns around this and am inherently suspicious of any new surveillance. I also get the reflexive dismissal of their value. In this case it has been a clear win for our community through the obvious deterrent factor and the much higher likelihood of having evidence if anything does happen. Our Flock cameras do not show on the map here, btw.

scottydelta 1y ago

> You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims — Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X. https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955 https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955

DaSHacka 1y ago
Lmao, hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic Reminder to archive all of these posts by people affiliated with the project for when the inevitable ultimate enshittification happens and they attempt to backpedal.
Y_Y 1y ago
don't bite the feed that feeds you

stef25 1y ago

Here in Belgium the contract for these cameras on highways was given to a family run business who charged nothing at all for the hardware and installation in exchange for a decent cut of every fine that's issues with them. They're financially very healthy.

jacquesm 1y ago
That's disgusting.

unglaublich 1y ago

This is quite tame compared to tracking cookies on the web!

horseradish7k 1y ago
it is easier to clear your cookies than get a new license plate.
- slumberlust 1y ago
  Sure is, but they don't only rely on your cache for fingerprinting.

crimsoneer 1y ago

Maybe I'm less sensitive to this coming from the UK, where we're quited to ANPR, but this feels pretty okay to me. When you drive a giant hunk of metal, you accept a higher burden of government surveillance.

tsbischof 1y ago
Why accept surveillance and tracking without a narrow and well-defined scope? It is one thing to track cars for estimating traffic velocity, it is another entirely to create a national database of all locations any given individual has been seen, with minimal oversight to the purpose for collecting and using that data.
- WindyMiller 1y ago
  > all locations any given individual has been seen This is perhaps another reason people in the UK might be more chill about ANPR: we're smaller and incrementally less carbrained, so to describe ANPR as tracking "all locations any given individual has been seen" sounds like wild hyperbole. (Of course all our police forces are frothing at the mouth to roll out facial recognition everywhere they can, so kicking off a bit more about surveillance might not be a bad idea...)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ck2 1y ago

Unless you don't carry a phone, they know where you are at all times anyway If not realtime, then historically, without a warrant, for any reason they want Not saying that's okay but it's what's been happening for decades and well known/documented They even know every single person who visited Epstein's Island via cellphone tracking

stn8188 1y ago

Skimming the map, I see many listed are in parking lots for Home Depot and Lowe's. I assume that's because of high dollar items and common theft issues? I'm wondering if those cameras are specifically operated by this Flock company, or others as well.

infecto 1y ago
They are in my experience flock only. They are financially a smart decision for those types of businesses. They one get some analytics tracking out for the box(which a Walmart might already be doing themselves) but more importantly they bridge local police with know shoplifters. As soon as the identified car enters the parking lot both the police and Walmart know.
tsbischof 1y ago
It is specifically Flock. For a bit of data, check around page 110 of this report on data sharing between camera operators: https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2025/07/23/JCSO_Agency_Sharing.pdf https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2025/07/23/JCSO_Agency_S...

infecto 1y ago

I have very mixed feelings about this tech. On one hand there does feel like a deteriorating society, more petty crime, I almost never see police anymore. Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets. Lots of street racing during the day on busy streets and just general chaos. Without a doubt education and parenting is a root problem for most of these issues. The idea of people able to simple track cars is elegant and can be a huge multiplier of effectiveness for police. I am generally not opposed to it. The problem as we know is there really is not good safety guards on it. Too many law enforcement have used it improperly. The root there is this idea that the thin blue line exists, police are under educated, trained and paid. It’s a very mixed feeling for myself.

Aurornis 1y ago
> Surely I have some roses colored glasses from my youth but it felt like growing up and in my 20s you would see cops writing tickets. I do think public sentiment would swing hard against this type of widespread tracking if we could see laws enforced more regularly. I live in a low crime city, but even I’m growing frustrated with the flagrant violation of basic laws. We take the kids to nearby park where it’s becoming common for maybe 1 in 100 cars to speed 50-60mph down the adjoining road (twice the speed limit). 1 in 100 doesn’t sound like a lot but it means i see it several times during a single visit. They don’t slow down or stop at the crosswalks. Only 10 years ago, I remember speed patrols on this road once a week. They would nab anyone flagrantly blowing crosswalks or going significantly over the speed limit. It had a huge effect and you rarely saw violations. Now: Nothing. I was talking to my wife and we couldn’t remember the last time there was an officer doing speed checks on that road, despite the constant problems and being adjacent to the biggest park around. The basic laws and regulations just don’t seem to matter any more. Even the trails we like to hike where dogs are only allowed on-leash is full of off-leash dogs. There was a time when you risked getting random a ticket if you were caught with an off-leash dog, but now it’s not a possibility anyone even thinks about. The spot checks and ticket writing previously kept everyone honest, but now it’s rare to see a dog on leash. My friend’s dog (on leash) was attacked by someone’s off leash dog recently and they barely wrestled it away. A visiting friend of mine was bitten by an off leash dog while walking, though it was a small dog she could shake off. It’s still all so bizarre to me that any enforcement of the rules seemingly disappeared overnight. I know it’s nothing relative to the people living in areas where shoplifting is rampant or you have to fear violent crime, but I think the root cause is similar: A complete lack of visible enforcement emboldens people to ignore them. When the problem becomes widespread, public opinion about invasive enforcement and monitoring becomes more welcoming.

fhdkweig 1y ago

A map can only tell you where the fixed position cameras are. Both police cars and tow truck companies are scanning every plate on every car they drive past and share that info with each other.

fcpguru 1y ago

i feel like with AR glasses and phones and dash cams etc there just isn't going to be a place without ALPR readers going 24/7 soon?

tsbischof 1y ago
I will be surprised if there is not a startup in the coming years that pays you to run a surveillance mining app that shares data as a way to subsidize the cost of the hardware. The surveillance state equivalent of ads

cozzyd 1y ago

I think we need a parallel, citizen-run ALPR network that could e.g. send out warnings when e.g. ICE vehicles drive by. Surely what's good for the goose is good for the gander?

Vitamin_Sushi 1y ago

Maybe I'm still bitter about having my car being hit twice, both times being a hit-and-run which I was basically 100% on the hook for, but maybe I'm okay with this (provided it's only on taxpayer funded roads only)? Driving, at least in the US, is a privilege and you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy out in public anyway.

CamperBob2 1y ago
Sounds like you're weighing a momentary convenience against an unbounded downside. It's true that we have no expectation of privacy on the roads as individuals, but one thing that both ML researchers and evil dictators will agree on is that quantity has a quality all its own.
- Vitamin_Sushi 1y ago
  Traffic enforcement is abysmal in my city (I'm sure in many other places too), and our ever-increasing car insurance premiums reflect that. If there's a better way to enforce traffic laws or punish drunk drivers rear ending me and running off, then I'm all ears. Right now, the only other alternative I'm reading is letting the problem get worse.

onetokeoverthe 1y ago

[dead]

bokohut 1y ago

Fifteen years ago now in Dec 2010 I made a post on my now defunct blog about ALPR and I updated it for a few years. My experiences with LE along side my technical skillset had me 'finding' things. I wont post the entire blog entry text since it is too long for this format but I did include some relevant entries to the point of how long this has really been occurring. Links are very old so YMMV. ========= Dec 1 2010 Automated License Plate Readers - ALPR So tonight someone we will call the "suspect" robbed a liquor store with a shotgun and the Delaware State Police were in action with ALPR technology. It was stated by a witness that the "suspect" was seen getting into a late 90's model civic or small hatchback so thus the ALPR call. At the same time troopers were going door to door in the area checking on the well fair of residence in the area. Aside from a helicopter, K9 tracking, and what was at least 15 law enforcement officers from various local jurisdictions setup in a layered perimeter around the area the suspect evaded. I have included a mp3 segment of the Automatic License Plate Recognition vehicle convo and a swf clip showing a trooper setup at an exterior perimeter point. UPDATE: 08/07/2011 Finally the word is out as they only had it for years. Link with video http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20110807/NEWS02/108070345/License-plate-software-stirs-privacy-debate http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20110807/NEWS02/108070... UPDATE2: 12/02/2011 National general news on ALPR http://www.privacylives.com/washington-post-eyes-turn-to-license-plate-readers/2011/11/21/ http://www.privacylives.com/washington-post-eyes-turn-to-lic... UPDATE3: 12/08/2011 Have enough bank? - then you can even buy it http://www.avigilon.com/products/licenseplaterecognition/ http://www.avigilon.com/products/licenseplaterecognition/ UPDATE4: 07/31/2012 Getting some more press http://www.aclu.org/automatic-license-plate-readers-threat-americans-privacy http://www.aclu.org/automatic-license-plate-readers-threat-a... Are they watching you? http://www.aclu.org/maps/automatic-license-plate-readers-are-you-being-followed http://www.aclu.org/maps/automatic-license-plate-readers-are... UPDATE5: 07/16/2012 Tracking you illegally? http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57594179/aclu-warns-of-mass-tracking-through-license-plate-scanners/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57594179/aclu-warns-of-m... UPDATE6: 04/07/2015 Gone and done it - Even with all the Ed Snowden press now they are going national with ALPR. https://cdt.org/blog/government-keeps-its-eyes-on-the-road-with-invasive-license-plate-reader-program/ https://cdt.org/blog/government-keeps-its-eyes-on-the-road-w...