In my case the city had to publish their agreement with Flock and I was able to find the city council presentation showing exactly where they put the cameras, and many selling points of how great Flock is. In fact, someone else in my town had already marked them.

Obviously, this website does nothing for us, just glance up at any egress or ingress to where you live (in the US) and note you've been tracked. Or feel free to update the node with better information if you have it.

This is because the metadata in OSM doesn't include the tags that Deflock looks for:

You can see the requirements here https://deflock.me/report/id but the two you're looking for are.

manufacturer operator

I think they should add Siemens Sicore cameras to their known camera database, but they do show up on Deflock despite not being mentioned explicitly on the website. Here is an example in one of my contributions via OSM. https://deflock.me/map#map=18/53.786783/-1.551438

There are probably a lot more cameras than are listed in the database.

You could point a camera down the street you live on and record the license plate of every car that passes and video of every pedestrian for a few hundred dollars.

I thought about doing this a couple of years ago when there were a few instances of theft going on. To get into or out of my neighborhood, you have to drive by my home and I wondered if I could capture the license plate of the thieves.

One thing you could do is go and physically look at the camera. https://deflock.me/identify has pictures of cameras from at least the major providers.

The law can be utterly egregious and an affront to morality. Legal behavior can thus be an utterly egregious affront to human decency. See: Apartheid

There is no handwaving away the moral implications of these technologies, and who they empower to do what to whom.

> But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.

No, it's not.

The person in question was in Washington state at the time. Abortions are not blanket illegal in Washington. You cannot be prosecuted in Texas for breaking a Texas law for something you did in Washington (though some states are already in the process of trying to close that loophole, and have created the crime of "conspiracy to commit abortion").

It's also quite likely that accessing these Washington Flock records violated Washington law.

> Just to be clear, most abortions in Texas are illegal. That's not necessarily a good thing. Nor are flock cameras necessarily a good thing. But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.

(IANAL.) In the specific case cited by the parent poster, AFAICT looking at the facts of the case, no Texas law was violated, nor do the authorities involved ever allege that any law was violated.

Nonetheless, the authorities involved in this case violated her privacy, including use of ALPR cameras in other states. The reasoning given is disputed, and seems to be a motte/bailey between "it was a missing person report" (with specious reasoning as to her being "missing") and "investigation of an abortion" that the State themselves admits they "could not statutorily charge [her]" for.

> arguably, none of them should

Indisputably, once someone has a hammer, especially one that grants them this much extra power, they will go looking for nails. In 2025 those who still defend those "hammers" with the wide-eyed impression that they can somehow control them once they're out there are at best showing hubris, lack of foresight, and disregard for the history books.

To be more clear, when you push for "less sharing" and somehow get it, you aren't actually getting what you want, you're just getting less of what you didn't want. It's like when the waiter asks you how much spit you want in your soup, the correct answer is to kick the waiter out not to demand a minimal amount.

Because those places have a huge problem with shoplifting. At least that's the story they tell.

Montana is an interesting state. Very few cameras state wide (20), and all but 3 are at Lowe's and Home Depot.

Home improvement stores have a LOT of theft, especially in some cities. People try to walk out with power tools and expensive gear all the time.

Yes, the "Damned if you don't" faction is polling well against the "Damned if you do" faction currently.

Either way, we're still just making a shit sandwich and arguing over the condiments.

It's always curious how and when you decide to pop into threads and request that people follow the rules of hackernews. You claim that the site and your moderation principles are not (or have limited) ideologically motivated(tions), but your enforcement (or engagement) is uneven and certainly along some political axis.

From the rules:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Yet one of the top comments of most front page items is always a useless comment of clickbait or some pedantic complaint/accusation about some format of the title/submission.

You have a hard job, it's not intended to be an indictment of your behavior. Just a general observation that I wonder if you're cognizant of.

If the community needs this so badly, why is the above aforementioned behavior so prevent that it's become a meme of hackernews behavior?

Do not engage the SNAFU. Keep your blinders on at all times. Obey.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-admin-caught-pass...

This argument very nearly kept Flock cameras alive in my muni, with the logic being that ALPRs weren't doing anything phones weren't already doing vis a vis privacy.

The process for getting access to cell phone data is much more difficult than the process of logging into a flock system

As a libertarian, I'll stop calling them fascists when they stop calling themselves conservatives and actually adopt some kind of honest label for what they stand for. But that would require them to stand for something constructive rather than simping for whatever destructive looting Dear Leader has divined this week.

While I agree with your overall statement, I want to note that OP said private enterprise, not private cameras. Flock is doing more than distributing hardware here.

>In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins.

This is not exactly an unbiased forum to discuss this matter since Flock is a YC backed program, but what do you think will happen in short order? Maybe that car thieves will simply slap on fake license plates to get out of the area?

What you’re left with then, is nothing but the tyrannical and even treasonous mass surveillance program to know where you go and when all your life, even when you leave your tracking device phone behind and use a tracking device free vehicle.

We started hoping that car thefts would be a pressure point for a lot of violent crime (which tends to be committed from stolen cars --- this is the Kia problem). But we caught more innocent drivers with stale entries on the Illinois LEADS hotlist than actual stolen cars. When we OK'd the system after its pilot, it was on the condition that we no longer curb cars based on stolen car reports at all --- we'd only curb them based on stolen license plates (which have no innocent explanation).

Maybe other states are different for this, but in Chicagoland, unless you don't care about disproportionately harming Black motorists, using Flock for stolen car enforcement was a flop.

The community got together, worked on a solution, that solution lead to arrests. A politically savvy prosecutor would not easily dismiss an organized community with proven ability to drive results.

So yes, the camera didn't do it, but it helped.

Flock Safety is a lot more than ALPR. They just try to fit in as an ALPR because those have been used for years. They do use their video feed to find unique identifiers of vehicles, such as dents, mods, color, make, model, etc. It's also highly likely they are doing facial recognition at some locations. I do not believe they are doing gait recognition yet for pedestrians, but it's just a matter of time.