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".
They're not a public body, that was my point
What a sick society we live in.
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For homeowners, the real estate transactions are public and majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts.
Most people don't expect their identity to be discoverable from their driving.
For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.
The fact that you are linked in, as in a chain, sure does not help with dispelling my impression.
“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.
What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.
I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.
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.
There's a bunch of articles about them here: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
edit: grammar
If the car is leased, wouldn’t this just give leasing company details?
Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.
I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.
If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.
There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.
Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.
In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?
Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.
Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.
Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?
Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?
In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.
PS Hello from Grand Rapids!
You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL
Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.
The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
Or even skip the API part and just buy that data in bulk. Or just collect it from a variety of freely leaked databases.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
Put in your name, address, phone number, dob, ssn and bank details - we will post you a cheque for $2.50
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
(0x1) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
See Mosaic + Carpenter case which say “Yes, each scan is public; yes, aggregation is different. "
Carpenter shows the Court recognizes that aggregated location data can be constitutionally significant.
Individual observability vs. systemic observation: A passerby can note a single plate at a single place/time. But a system of ALPRs, distributed spatially and continuous in time, indexed and retained, can map a person’s entire movements, associations, repeated visits, and behavioral patterns. That’s exactly the “mosaic” insight: the whole reveals things the pieces don’t. (Maynard / Jones reasoning).
Lets brainstorm!
Theres a parking lot... what are the 10 wealthiest car owners...and the 10 frailest oldest people... or maybe the 20 women aged 19-25 blond under 150 pounds... and when do they get off work tired, drive home each day? What's the most isolated gas station,convenience store they stop at? Ones where few other cars pass by? Who's homes don't show a 2nd car in driveway? Owned by 6'5" 200 pound man? Who frequently visits a karate studio?
Or: im a car salesman, in comes a customer, whining abt lowering the price bc Theyre broke... lemme just look up where they eat supper every night! How much time they spend at airports! What school they drop off their kids! Who comes to their house? Nannies? Oh look drug dealers, i can threaten them with blackmail!
Sound ridiculous? All the data brings it into focus. A local detective told me theyre focusing on robberies of $ethnicity restaurants bc that group stockpiles cash in their homes...
And this is all assuming good info, but when u get creative:
..what if we look for mistakes... hey that annoying $religious neighbor pissed me off with his loud music. His kids car shows up as visiting thr wrong side of town..probably a wrong digit but lets report him anyway!!!
Or: Hey lets scan all the wifi dbs for ssids that seem like defaults, then offer them csam-insurance: you pay me $1000 cash rn and ill insure i dont browse csam from your network! And my alpr data says when youre home and your iot devs tell me when you go to sleep so we'll slip it in at before-bed-wank-time!
Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.
Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.
That just doesn't strike me as a very efficient way of doing evil.
You can just go on accurint and find the oldest people living alone in the richest neighbourhoods near you. You can even fairly reliably find out whether or not they have living relatives.
All this deeply sensitive data is already readily available. I don't think IP+license plate data would be particularly interesting unless you're Google and able to gather that at an absolutely massive scale. But even then, you'd be using it for extremely boring kinds of evil.
Then again, these modes of transport are less popular in the US; I guess such a surveillance system is extra effective in the US because of that.
People get framed and stolen from all the time and this will certainly make it worse.
Then never think about it again.
That was just my reaction reading the OP.
First paragraph: reasonable, if ignoring that access it not likely to be unrestricted willy-nilly.
Second paragraph: not as reasonable given that Amazon likely comply without issue with us intelligence, and sell the data to third parties, which the police could just buy (similar has been done) to avoid consent or legal obstacles.
Third paragraph: out of nowhere, focus on police. No mention of intelligence agency staff or say Amazon staff doing the same thing.
I just had a wee chuckle to myself was all.
* 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
Do they get permission or permit to install them?
With the right access controls and approval processes, that can be fully solved in a week.
What do you think the chances are that we could invent a system like that? You don't think Flock and the police would find a way to circumvent it do you?
Please don’t make it seem like it’s a “popularity” thing; it’s a necessity thing.
Let people slowly get interested in protecting their privacy; as they say, better late than never!
In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.
Some European cities I remember having pervasive cameras in public transport a decade ago, ostensibly to prosecute vandals.
Ring is problematic in some ways but doesn’t produce trivially searchable metadata.
Without using an LLC, most every state requires you to register your vehicle where you live within 30-90 days with some exceptions (ie college students).
Even with the LLC, if you catch the attention of the state, I believe you might be risking being charged with tax evasion even if your goal was to protect your privacy. This is especially true if you can't prove the LLC to be a legitimate business venture.
Yeah, the Corolla won't be mistaken for a supercar, but many states have begun cracking down on residents with Montana plates such as Georgia, Ohio, and New York.
Also, insuring a car with out of state registration can be committing insurance fraud. Rates and fees are different between states due to different regulations. Further, depending on your policy, the insurer could deny claims because the car wasn't garaged in the state it was registered.
Really, if the privacy is of sufficient priority, the best solution is to just do things properly and move to rural Montana instead.
As the cost of compute and wireless communications continues to drop, facial recognition will be prolific. There are more limitations with cameras, but AI will make it easy to backtrack movement to a place where they get a clean shot that can identify you.
As an example, the transit authority in NYC Metro was able to plug existing security feeds from trains into Amazon Rekognition to count heads, which feeds their ticketing app — you can see which carriages are full. As time goes on, they’ll become able to track the breadcrumbs individuals from seat to platform. (If not already)
Detectives do this manually today. I was on a jury where the purse snatcher was followed by various cameras until he got on a bus. They pulled the bus passes and tracked his pass back to his girlfriend.
Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.
You can buy local or do it yourself, but all of those are squeezed at the margins by enshittified inputs.
Before even seeking to fix the problem, I try to work on me.
First, I try (difficult) to not be sucked into useless wallowing, which keeps me exactly where the enemy wants me to be. I tend to skim 'news' headlines now, if that.
Second, in my career I strive to produce uncommon quality so as to not add to the problem.
I love to stand out and feel proud of my work. It makes me sad when coworkers are concerned/confused when I put in extra effort. I know where they're coming from. No one notices nor cares at $megacorp, and my work is internal and humble.
I do it for self-improvement and to make the time I spend working for them worthwhile to me.
The cameras don't track me either. They track a car. They have no idea who is driving the car.
> If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too
That's the interesting bit, how did ANPR get into the US public consciousness now, rather than over a decade ago when it started to be used on toll roads
The vast majority of Americans live in cities. Half live in just 8 metro-areas, just as the vast majority of Europeans live in cities. Europe is far more dispersed though.
ANPR has been a thing for 30 years. Is America just slow on the uptake? Even then it looks like they've been in use for a long time there.
But, in Canada, there are local communities that plow bike infrastructure and locals bike in their deep winter.
It's a chicken or egg problem of building infrastructure for users and users demanding infrastructure. It's not some fact of nature that it's impossible. Different communities have different priorities. So, necessity is a bit strong of a word.
Isn't this a safety hazard?
The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.
[1]: https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/publicatio... page 6
[2]: https://metropolitan-council.github.io/TBI_Household_Synthes... “Driving remains the predominant mode of travel in the region, representing 83% of trips in 2023.”
I also find everyone is hungry for kudos. I recommend being very liberal and publicly vocal with genuine kudos if you have them!
That's a "santa claus for adults" rumor.
Ring only complies with requests that they are legally obligated to. Otherwise users need to voluntarily share the footage, which more often than not they do.
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".
The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.
This Michigan thing sounds like it walks right up to the line if not over it.
You have masked secret police grabbing people off the street en masse with impunity, why would states care about pesky laws like FOIA?
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."
That is one aspect.
But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?
Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.
Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".
And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.
It really is fucking dystopian.
I trust the government a lot more than some random third party company ("flock"), though.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
I live in Jackson Hole. None of my neighbours knew what these were. They’re getting taken out.
Don’t presume what folks are worried about without asking them.
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
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.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
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.
The question was “isn’t that the state with license plates that say ‘live free or die’?” And even if you get a license plate that doesn’t say it, NH is still the state with those plates
They don’t say “hibf just walked into the 7-11” yet. The Feds probably have a system that can do that for car passengers traveling on “drug corridors” (ie. I95) today.
Some are for government spying while others are for government spying and other bad actors.
I’d love to gain access to said parking garage meter camera and scan plates too, only I’m looking for high value targets that just got to work and thus, left their home.
I’m looking at software used to capture, track, and pull data from all these sources in an attempt to build a dragnet like service where you can ask “where is license plate <bingo>”?
Getting tracked by your map application or OS platform can be countered by using an open source ROM and a local map provider like OpenStreetMap. Gtting tracked by the car itself can oftentimes be prevented by unplugging the telematics unit (or its antennas) or bypassing it with special cables. But there's nothing you can legally do to protect against the Flock cameras, without ignoring the law entirely and going around town with an angle grinder.
I don't think you're racist in the slightest.