Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (alpr)

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.)

With how poor Flock's own security is, using unauthenticated APIs for the vast majority of their service, and camera access points using hardcoded passwords, anyone who's even half motivated could have already done this.

In anticipation of this happening someone should build an open source project that processes data points from these cameras, reconstructs movement, correlates the data with with various public and non-public databases, and provides a searchable user interface that will make the average person shit their pants through combination of panic and disgust when they see it.

Then just wait for the inevitable data leak and let the public track the movements of every politician and lobbyist (by name), correlated with their other activities, as well as track anonymized members of the general public.

The average person won't ever "get it" unless they see a system like that for themselves. That might not be enough either but it would lead to some progress if executed well.

They are used to read - and recognize - plates.

The official use is to check if the car is insured, or if a stolen / marked car is going through the road, in both cases the police is dispatched to check on the vehichle

They are used on highways to monitor average speed and in cities to check that no "illegal" cars enter the city. Illegal being ones that don't comply with euronorms anymore.

At least you were lucky that the criminal masterminds who cloned your car's number plate did not bother to match the make and model, that made it obvious to spot for the police. Otherwise you might have had trouble explaining...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.