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Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from
by tptacek 11mo ago
Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
- calvinmorrison 11mo agoFlock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
- tptacek 11mo agoWhat's your point? To the extent they're a private company you're even less likely to get access to records from Flock ALPR cameras.
- calvinmorrison 11mo ago> at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete. They're not a public body, that was my point
- hopelite 11mo agoThey de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance.
- bigbuppo 11mo agoJust because the records created on behalf of the government are held by a private enterprise doesn't mean they aren't government records.
- tptacek 11mo agoRight, I agree. My point is that the FOIA laws of many states forbid disclosing the data this web page purports to surface.
- stackghost 11mo ago[flagged]
- tptacek 11mo agoReally? Me of all people? What about my Slovak ethnic identity do you think so attunes me to the concerns you're bringing?
- pppppiiiiiuuuuu 11mo agoIt's clear in context that they mean your background in computer security and political activism, I don't know where you are getting the idea that it's an comment on your ethnicity.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- stackghost 11mo agoThe HN guidelines ask users to assume the most charitable interpretation/good faith. Even for "big name" accounts.
- lovich 11mo ago"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." Is the response I get for my good faith arguments. This is a forum run by tech oligarchs. Speech is being modified on here.
- dehrmann 11mo agoWould they be subject to CCPA, then?
- FireBeyond 11mo agoYeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws. Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
- hopelite 11mo agoThere is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers. That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
- diydsp 11mo agoRule 1. Do not comply in advance. Do not accept it as inevitable. Do not give away your power without friction.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11mo agotptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".
- potato3732842 11mo agoHe also lives in a "nice" suburb of Chicago IIRC I strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue. And by "strongly suspect" I mean "know because I live in that kind of neighborhood in a different city in a different state".
- tptacek 11mo agoIt's genuinely funny how wrong you are about this, or about what my intersection with Flock is. Go on, keep extrapolating!
- kasey_junk 11mo agoI’m pretty confused by the innuendo in the posters comment to even get what they are saying, but I can report from the south side of chicago that surveillance cameras are largely popular across demographics.
- tptacek 11mo agoHe's suggesting that Oak Park is supportive of Flock cameras because we're afraid of Black folks.
- mycall 11mo ago* While our most recent data is from 12/4/2025, there may be significant historical gaps. * Most agencies don't proactively publish audit logs Records requests can take months or years to fulfill Some agencies heavily redact their logs * We may not have requested logs from your local agencies yet
- sp332 11mo agoIn New Hampshire, we banned both public and private ALPRs. You can see on the map that the only ones are at toll booths. Those got explicit exemptions in the law.
- dehrmann 11mo agoIsn't that the state with license plates that say "live free or die?" Unless, of course, you have a moral objection to that statement, cf. Wooley v. Maynard.
- RobotCaleb 11mo agoI'm sure that's their state license plate motto regardless of your moral objection
- monerozcash 11mo agoIn Wooley v. Maynard SCOTUS held that NH could not require it's citizens to use a license plate displaying the state motto.
- RobotCaleb 11mo agoIt's still their license plate motto and it's still not dependent on your moral objection
- monerozcash 11mo agoDo you see anyone claiming the opposite? The point is that they will not write the motto on your license plate if you object. I get that HN attracts a certain amount of pedantry, but I can't figure out what exactly you're even trying to be pedantic about. There's not single comment here that could be reasonably interpreted as suggesting that "live free or die" isn't their motto
- 11mo ago
- hibf 11mo agoYou're right that the dataset is incomplete, but it contains searches done by police, not plates read by Flock. The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.
- tptacek 11mo agoI have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential. Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
- hibf 11mo agoI'll assume you're correctly citing the statute — someone entering a sequence of characters in a "Search" field doesn't mean that the search term was "gathered by" or "created from the analysis of" ALPR data.
- rahimnathwani 11mo agoat the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete It's not a dataset of license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras. It's a dataset of license plate numbers that have been entered into search tools. Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.
- tptacek 11mo agoYeah, and Illinois law defines that as "ALPR data" and restricts its disclosure.
- rahimnathwani 11mo agoSorry. I commented before realizing that someone else already made the same point earlier, and you already explained that the law covers more than what you mentioned in your first comment.