Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA

105•sodality2•7h ago

Built this over the last few days, based on a Rust codebase that parses the latest ALPR reports from OpenStreetMaps, calculates navigation statistics from every tagged residential building to nearby amenities, and tests each route for intersection with those ALPR cameras (Flock being the most widespread).

These have gotten more controversial in recent months, due to their indiscriminate large scale data collection, with 404 Media publishing many original pieces (https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/) about their adoption and (ab)use across the country. I wanted to use open source datasets to track the rapid expansion, especially per-county, as this data can be crucial for 'deflock' movements to petition counties and city governments to ban and remove them.

In some counties, the tracking becomes so widespread that most people can't go anywhere without being photographed. This includes possibly sensitive areas, like places of worship and medical facilities.

The argument for their legality rests upon the notion that these cameras are equivalent to 'mere observation', but the enormous scope and data sharing agreements in place to share and access millions of records without warrants blurs the lines of the fourth amendment.

Comments

DivingForGold•6h ago

https://archive.ph/et1uD

runtimepanic•6h ago

One thing this surfaces nicely is how scale changes the privacy model. Individually these look like “mere observation,” but once you can reconstruct routine movement patterns across counties, the data starts behaving more like long-term tracking than casual surveillance.

hamdingers•5h ago

100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where filming in public is a constitutionally protected right and networked ALPR capability is possible (if not regularly offered yet) in commodity doorbell cameras.

autoexec•5h ago

> 100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where filming in public is a constitutionally protected right a

It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be protected under the fourth amendment.

hamdingers•4h ago

If a home or business owner sets up Ring cameras, is it fair to say Amazon is recording in public? That feels like blaming Canon for the behavior of a paparazzi, but perhaps there are reasons those aren't equivalent I'm not aware of.

autoexec•3h ago

> hat feels like blaming Canon for the behavior of a paparazzi, but perhaps there are reasons those aren't equivalent I'm not aware of.

The difference between ring cameras and paparazzi using a canon camera is that the photos recorded to film/local storage can't be automatically compiled with the footage captured from everyone else's canon camera to create databases of people and track their movements, activities, attributes, etc.

It really depends on where the data goes and who can access it. I'd even go so far as to say that keeping that data on the cloud is fine as long as the data is encrypted, amazon doesn't access it beyond storage and deliver to the customer (meaning that they can no longer mine it for personal data) and amazon cannot give access to anyone else (including police who should have to request footage directly from the camera owners).

hamdingers•3h ago

We seem to have strayed into your opinions on how things ought to be, while my comment was meant to acknowledge the reality (unfortunate though it may be) that we live in.

The law doesn't make this distinction you're making. If you replace Canon with "iPhone/Android with cloud photo backup enabled" then your issue with Ring cameras applies to all smartphones. Maybe you'd prefer that not be the case, but it is.

In any case, I'd prefer we not get hung up on this lossy analogy since neither activity is restricted by current law which is my actual point.

autoexec•3h ago

Our current reality is that the photos taken with my Canon aren't being handed over to police without my knowing it, and aren't used to track people. The same can't be said about footage from people's ring cameras.

It's not clear to me that photos taken with an iphone with cloud backup enabled are compiled into national databases that track people's movements like ring and flock cameras are today either.

Currently flock and ring cameras are tracking people at a scale that canon cameras just aren't. Therefore it is fair to blame Amazon and flock but not cannon for the manner in which amazon and flock uses the footage their cameras collect to violate our rights.

stronglikedan•4h ago

> filming in public is a constitutionally protected right

As with everything, there's much nuance to this "right".

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...

hamdingers•3h ago

Only the government is bound by the fourth amendment, as long as the people setting up the cameras and running the network are private citizens it's fair game (correct me if I'm wrong).

Imagining a universe where companies are also bound by that is an interesting thought exercise. Many products (cloud photo backup, foursquare style "check-ins," location sharing with friends, etc) would be simply impossible because the aggregated data amounts to comprehensive surveillance.

fortran77•4h ago

I'm a private citizen. On my house we have an ALPR Axis camera pointing down the street (in addition to Axis cameras around the whole perimiter.) And when the police ask, we almost always provide them with data. I feel perfectly justified doing this, and we've helped solved several crimes.

ruthie_cohen•4h ago

Most people would do the same in your situation, we should expect citizens to want to help victims of crime, especially crimes against the person.

However I think there’s a significant difference between a single household and a centralised network of cameras across dozens of states.

For me the core issue of this is private enterprise holding gigantic amounts of PII, and the forms that is taking.

Computer0•4h ago

Hi enemy! :)

crims0n•3h ago

Sounds like a rough neighborhood, stay safe.

tptacek•3h ago

It is an inevitability, because a critical mass of municipalities are going to roll these out such that there isn't a practical route to take through any major metro without being recorded.

joecool1029•5h ago

The county lists are wrong, at least they are for my state of New Jersey. We have 21 counties, not 27. Is it picking up the bordering counties that might have overlapping contracts or something?

pavel_lishin•4h ago

One of those counties is Rockland, which is in NY. I wonder if it's counting bordering counties for states, since the assumption may be that the closest essential services for some Rockland residents may be in New Jersey.

joecool1029•4h ago

I know at least in Rockland's case, their power utility extends slightly into NJ. Can see it on statewide power outage trackers like this one: https://projects.nj.com/data/outagetracker/

sodality2•4h ago

It pulls counties from OSM administrative boundaries of level 6, which according to the OSM wiki, is "State counties and county equivalents, Territorial municipalities" (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag%3aboundary=administr...). It does lead to some weird oddities, like counties with under 10 homes... I'd rather not manually correct it, since I want to rely on pure OSM data. (Unless you mean there is an actual bug in the processing and there's counties listed that aren't in the right states...)

I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to verify/edit.

eesmith•4h ago

There are also not 53 states.

mv4•4h ago

yeah we have 8 counties in CT, not 14. The names are also wrong.

sodality2•3h ago

As far as I know there's no easy fix to this. It's the counties as reported by OpenStreetMaps' administrative boundaries.

cjensen•1h ago

California includes a number of counties which are actually in Baja California and Baja California del Sur.

s1mon•4h ago

I understand why these statistics may be interesting, but all I really want to see is a map of the locations of the ALPR cameras. I would add an easy link to that data on this site.

sodality2•4h ago

DeFlock is the first link in the "Related ALPR & Flock Projects" section, it contains a map.

toomuchtodo•4h ago

https://ringmast4r.github.io/FLOCK/

https://deflock.me/

yannyu•4h ago

I've thought about this a lot as I see more and more reckless driving in the areas I live in. Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. We seem to have a worst of all situations where traffic is getting increasingly difficult to enforce, driving is getting more dangerous year by year, and we're terrified of government overreach if we add any automation at all to enforcement.

I don't know the solution, but I do know that in the US we've lost 10-15 years of progress when it comes to traffic fatalities.

sodality2•4h ago

These cameras are currently not used at all for traffic/speed enforcement. The best they would do is track more serious crimes like hit-and-runs by photographing cars in the area.

yannyu•4h ago

Ah, that's helpful and something for me to learn more about. Thanks for the info.

chaps•4h ago

  > but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

This is not what Flock seeks to curb.

hamdingers•4h ago

I agree. It's frustrating that we have ended up in a reality where vehicle movement is heavily tracked, but we're not using that technology to do the most obvious and productive thing.

My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023.

Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.

MisterTea•3h ago

I live in NYC. People used to be afraid of double parking. Like you I regularly see the same bat-shit driving and no one seems to care to say or do anything. It's bonkers.

quamserena•3h ago

Part of the public pushback is that people almost always drive the “feels like” speed and not the posted speedlimit. We build 6 lane roads and then wonder why people go 50mph when it’s 35 posted, it’s because it’s 6 lanes and 35 feels slow. Cities profit from this in the form of speed cameras, which is why they’ve been outlawed in a lot of places.

derektank•3h ago

If the speeds aren’t appropriate for the built environment, then the limits should be changed or the environment should be changed. Enforcement of the law should be consistent regardless of the quality of the law.

asdff•2h ago

The driver blithely keeping with the flow of traffic is not the one I am worried about. It is the one who is aggressively trying to cut through the flow of traffic while putting everyone and themselves in danger that I worry about.

dylan604•7m ago

I love when cities time their lights so that aggressive drivers just get hit with waiting at a red light while driving the speed limit means hitting greens for long stretches.

dylan604•7m ago

Just because a road "feels" like it can handle more speed does not mean that it is. The wider streets are built to handle the volume of cars, not necessarily meant to become a speed way. There are several 6 lane roads in my area while being wide and well built still have many intersections only controlled by stop signs for the smaller streets with multiple intersections controlled by stop lights at the larger cross streets.

People unable to recognize this and only driving by the feels are the problem. Hand wavy comments like yours suggesting using the feels as being okay do not help the situation

ajross•3h ago

> driving is getting more dangerous year by year

Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent decades. Driving was twice as dangerous in the 80's as it is now.

standardUser•3h ago

That's thanks entirely to government-required safety features, not skilled drivers.

youngNed•3h ago

There is picture of a cyclist. He is holding a stick.

The cyclist puts the stick between his spokes.

The cyclist lies on the road, cursing the government, for causing this.

hamdingers•3h ago

You are incorrect. Fatalities in the US leveled out in the early 2010s and have been climbing since then. In all other developed nations they continued trending downwards.

This is not a statistical anomaly that can be handwaved by pointing out that things were worse 40 years ago. Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.

ajross•2h ago

> You are incorrect

Sigh. I hate that phrasing. But OK, fine: you are misreading me, misanalysing the data, or just plain spinning to mislead readers.

Fatalities per capita and per mile driven go steadily downward until covid, and maybe there's a bump after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... If you have numbers (you don't cite any) showing otherwise, they are being polluted by demographic trends (the US having higher population growth doesn't say anything about driver behavior).

> Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.

So spinning it is. Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025? Seems like "uniquely lethal" doesn't really constitute a good faith representation of the truth.

hamdingers•2h ago

Did you open the wikipedia article you linked? The first image contradicts you, see the caption:

> Per capita road accident deaths in the US reversed their decline in the early 2010s.

Amusing that you accuse me of bad faith framing and then pose a nonsense question like this:

> Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025?

I cannot time travel and neither can you. The comparison that matters is US in 2025 vs other developed nations in 2025, and with that framing the US is uniquely lethal.

Of course, a good faith reader of my comment would understand this, but we already know that's not you since you did the research and have decided to be wrong anyway.

selectodude•1h ago

According to the link that you posted, the roads in Germany in 2002 were quite a bit safer than the roads are in the USA in 2025. And they don’t have speed limits. Absolute no brainer to me.

Anyway, not to pile on but you are absolutely incorrect. Forgive the phrasing.

autoexec•3h ago

> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem.

It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help.

There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.

nerdsniper•58m ago

> Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help.

I can’t think of a way to implement this that wouldn’t ban passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle. Which could be even a bus or limousine.

LeifCarrotson•51m ago

I don't disagree, but I can totally imagine a society where this inability is perfectly acceptable because it severely reduces the #1 killer of people from 5-55yo. I don't think we live in that society, if Apple and Google flipped a switch tomorrow to do that people would freak out, but I could imagine a rational, fictional society that had different shared values.

mikem170•46m ago

A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to mention texting while driving!

I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.

dylan604•13m ago

Lots of cars now come with a WiFi hot spot as part of their offerings. There's no way to prevent the driver from also connecting to it and circumventing whatever ill conceived notion this is

autoexec•4m ago

Even connected to wifi a cell phone will still use the wireless network. Even airplane more won't actually stop your phone from connecting anymore. GPS data can also be transmitted in the background over wifi back to apple/google and/or the device manufacturer.

autoexec•8m ago

Not entirely. The phones can defect if there are other phones nearby, so a single phone in a car on a highway going 75mph could be assumed to be a driver, but that is still just an assumption.

dylan604•3m ago

We cracked down on driving under the influence with changes from DWI to DUI. In the 10-15 years you mention, the prevalence of distracted driving from mobile devices has gotten out of hand. There's no field sobriety test that can prove one was distracted by a device. That makes this much more difficult to crack down on.

Barathkanna•4h ago

This is great work. Once ALPR coverage is dense enough that you can’t go anywhere without generating a permanent record, the “mere observation” argument falls apart. Mapping this openly is one of the few ways communities can actually understand what they’ve signed up for.

ruthie_cohen•4h ago

If I was American I would certainly be using this tool as a consideration when moving / buying a new house.

I’ve watched a lot of the coverage by Benn Jordan on Flock cameras and their inherent vulnerabilities, and it’s deeply concerning.

The applications of these technologies far outpaces appropriate checks and balances, and the increasing fusion between law enforcement, intelligence and private industry is largely ignored by the larger population.

Thanks for developing this, it’s important to visualise the virus-like spread of these technologies and see where it is concentrated.

aunty_helen•4h ago

Number plates are just one of the privacy tracking technologies. Any modern connected car infotainment system will report and have that data sold or anything that has Bluetooth can be tracked.

exhilaration•4h ago

Recent car tracking discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097624

snarf21•4h ago

Including the camera and microphone in our pocket that pings every cell tower every time we move.

sodality2•3h ago

At least as per Carpenter v. United States, that data requires a warrant, not just any cop/LEO in the country typing in a license plate with reasoning as 'investigation'. That's a much better standard.

sodality2•3h ago

To an extent this data is within our reach to stop (buy old car, unplug cellular modules, etc). With ALPRs the only option is moving.

1970-01-01•2h ago

Bluetooth? You're overthinking this. We've been mandated to carry 4-5 transmitters per vehicle broadcasting their UIDs at 315 MHz since the mid 2000s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_TPMS

EvanAnderson•2h ago

I have an SDR in a facility that is a public parking lot. It picks up TMPS incidentally and I'm definitely able to track individual vehicles.

jcims•3h ago

I had a thought a while back about companies like Tesla, with cameras on the road and driving models that could classify bad drivers, being in a position to at least a) avoid those drivers if they are encountered on the road and b) record/report them to the police.

Then I had an intrusive thought of a small squad of cybertruck 'enforcers' running around autonomously, tracking these drivers down via the live network of incoming video and doling out punishment to the chief offenders.

rjsw•3h ago

Or the Tesla could just record where it is at all times.

tptacek•3h ago

From just a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170302

(Repeating: in a few months sites like this will be replaceable with a static HTML page that says "yes, you've been tagged by an ALPR".)

xnx•2h ago

I'm surprised an app like Citizen hasn't tried to match Flock with a dashcam that automatically shares recordings.

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