We had a local story where the gist was the police said they searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was actually more focused on a possible abortion. [1] "Unrelated" this same Sheriff was later charged with sexual harassment, perjury, and retaliation against a witness [2]. These are the types that are able to easily track you if they wanted to.
In exploring my state (Oregon), I'm seeing an interesting pattern to where they are frequently located. Specifically, at home improvement store parking lots.
And in most cases, the ones at home improvement stores are the only ones in the city. Salem (the state capital) only has them at Lowes. Eugene is an exception with many cameras (including Home Depot and Lowe's).
I'd be interested in when these cameras were placed. If recent, I'd wonder about an ICE/immigration response.
Just zooming around the map, here's a handful of citys I've seen...
I imagine there's some truth to that. But if I was someone wanting to setup some ICE action, I'd probably be drooling at the thought of accessing that data being a central gathering points for day laborers looking for work.
The thing about this Texas abortion Flock story is: whether or not your muni keeps Flock, absolutely no municipality should have out-of-state data sharing on (arguably, none of them should have any data sharing on at all --- operationally, departments do just fine making phone calls and getting the data they need).
This is totally configurable inside Flock. It's very easy for a police department to do. Sometimes they'll argue that they need to keep sharing open because sharing is reciprocal --- that's not true (in fact, you don't even need to have Flock cameras to get access to Flock data; that's a SKU Flock has!).
We piloted Flock with open sharing (my commission got consultation for the police General Order for ALPRs in our municipality, we pushed for no sharing alongside a bunch of other restrictions, we got most of what we wanted but not the sharing stuff). When the pilot ended and the board needed a go-no-go on deployment, another push got made on sharing and we got out-of-state sharing disabled as a condition of deployment. Then at contract renewal, when the writing was on the wall that we were killing the contract†, our police department turned off all sharing.
Even if you're not worried about stuff like reproductive health care (you should be), it doesn't make sense to allow departments that don't share your General Orders direct access to your telemetry.
† I wasn't a supporter on this for complicated reasons.
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.
Checked out the map, there is one near me on a parking lot with this OSM data
> camera:type fixed
> direction 340
> man_made surveillance
> surveillance:type ALPR
Which results in "Operated by: Unknown, Made by: Unknown". What am I supposed to do with that info I wonder. How would I find out if it's actually Flock or if law enforcement would actually have access to this particular camera.
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.
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.
>We had a local story where the gist was the police said they searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was actually more focused on a possible abortion.
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.
So it doesnt seems like a particularly egregious use of flock. It's just as egregious as it normally is, which is pretty egregious.
> 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.
Im saying its a normal, predictable use of flock. Not that it's OK. Many readers might not know that abortions for the most part aren't legal in Texas. You should expect flock to assist law enforcement in catching people doing something illegal.
They don't catch people doing something illegal. They might record someone's car being near some place where maybe something illegal happened. That's not the standard of "reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, and at best is (weak) circumstantial evidence.
These specific abortion laws and systems of surveillance are new and unprecedented, as is the use of them together. So we should very much like to be aware of when they are being used.
See sibling comment. It's not at all shown that the person did something illegal, in fact they did something quite legal, have an abortion in Washington state in a manner that was within the parameters of Washington's abortion laws.
> 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.
These are generally not private cameras; they're operated by states and municipalities. There are some corner cases like Home Depot that matter if your area has decided not to do ALPRs, but in most places, police department deployment of ALPRs is accelerating, not receding, and the private cameras are kind of a sideshow.
In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins. The citizens organized and funded the installation of Flock LPRs. Several criminals have been caught as a result, and crime is now down.
So the impetus is twofold:
- Funding provided by programs such as Operation Stonegarden and other grants
- Activists agitate for Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime --> The People clamor for Enhanced Security Measures and DIY
> the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins
> Several criminals have been caught
The actual difference here is that the second "caught" isn't followed by "and released". The camera didn't do it.
My street has repeat offenders who come and steal from cars nightly. The cops know who they are and have arrested them multiple times, with them immediately being released AFAIK. A million cameras wouldn't change this.
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.
The city I used to live in trialed flock cameras for car theft. They caught more car thefts in January of the trial year than the previous year’s total.
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 lesson I keep getting from your experiences is that LEADS needs an overhaul.
It turns out other states do have flags for things like "extraditable warrant" vs. just failure to appear warrants (something mentioned in previous discussions), and perhaps something could be done about the LEADS system if attention was given to it. It seems like fixing one's data sources is a great approach vs. tossing the baby out with the bathwater — unless of course that's the intention all along, as it is with many opposed to state-owned surveillance of this nature.
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.
Nobody cares that Flock is a YC company. I'd be surprised if most YC batch members even realized off the top of their head that Flock is YC. YC companies get criticized all the time on HN, including by people who have done YC.
Cameras with good software work great for that, however the data should NOT be freely accessible outside of the city/jurisdiction they surveil. That's the issue with Flock vs any other AI camera/database product.
There is a trend towards less personal accountability and more centralized prevention. Instead of properly dealing with people who misuse sharp knives, we are making all knives duller.
Of course, you should instead believe your own anecdotal evidence that marks a tally every time you hear about a crime, which if you watch local news is always, but doesn't mark a tally every time there isn't a crime.
But suddenly adding cameras that resulted in catching more people fixed the issue? Surely if the catch and release was the issue, that wouldn't make a difference.
I have been using different anonimization tools to blur out my face and license plate at as many locations as possible to keep my data as private as possible. This recent tool does it in a single shot in a chat. I was able to blur out LPR data very easily with high accuracy https://chat.vlm.run/c/7ca96025-1d6c-4c33-ab82-97e6f017883b
>Everyone should have the right to speak up against injustice without ending up in a database.
If you speak in a public place you should expect to possibly be recorded. If you want to share a message with the public, you should cower when people receive it. If you want privacy, then protest somewhere private.
"the only reason an officer is able to even search for a suspect at a protest is because ALPRs collected data on every single person who attended the protest."
No. This is simply not accurate. They collected data on every single car that attended, but there easily could be more people at the protest that rode in the same car, lyft/uber, took a bus, walked, or any other methods of getting there without a car.
Fair, but let's be realistic about the fact that it's also easy for cops to get cellphone tower and location data if they feel like doing correlations. If they tailor their request to the date and area around a protest this would be sufficiently 'narrowly tailored' for many judges to just give them a warrant.
This is downvoted (it probably won't be by the time you read it and I shouldn't be commenting on voting) but it's true. I think the underlying issue EFF is writing about here is directionally real, but I also think it's useful to know the ground truth about these things.
Please don't post like this to HN. Regardless of how bad a situation is or you feel it is, we need you (i.e. not you personally, but all of us) to stick to the site guidelines.
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 an 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?
the test for this will be the mid-terms. current polls are leaning towards a correction, but polls have been so badly wrong the past several elections that I put no faith in them
We had a local story where the gist was the police said they searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was actually more focused on a possible abortion. [1] "Unrelated" this same Sheriff was later charged with sexual harassment, perjury, and retaliation against a witness [2]. These are the types that are able to easily track you if they wanted to.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
[2] https://www.fox4news.com/news/johnson-county-sheriff-arreste...
And in most cases, the ones at home improvement stores are the only ones in the city. Salem (the state capital) only has them at Lowes. Eugene is an exception with many cameras (including Home Depot and Lowe's).
I'd be interested in when these cameras were placed. If recent, I'd wonder about an ICE/immigration response.
Just zooming around the map, here's a handful of citys I've seen...
Lowe's: Albany, Salem, McMinville, Vancouver WA, Fairview, Eugene, Bend, Redmond, Medford
Home Depot: Sherwood, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Cedar Mill (Beaverton), Tigard, Vancouver WA, Portland (multiple), Gresham, Oregon City
* Edit * Ah here's an article about this: https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from...
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/home-depot-immigration-i...
This is totally configurable inside Flock. It's very easy for a police department to do. Sometimes they'll argue that they need to keep sharing open because sharing is reciprocal --- that's not true (in fact, you don't even need to have Flock cameras to get access to Flock data; that's a SKU Flock has!).
We piloted Flock with open sharing (my commission got consultation for the police General Order for ALPRs in our municipality, we pushed for no sharing alongside a bunch of other restrictions, we got most of what we wanted but not the sharing stuff). When the pilot ended and the board needed a go-no-go on deployment, another push got made on sharing and we got out-of-state sharing disabled as a condition of deployment. Then at contract renewal, when the writing was on the wall that we were killing the contract†, our police department turned off all sharing.
Even if you're not worried about stuff like reproductive health care (you should be), it doesn't make sense to allow departments that don't share your General Orders direct access to your telemetry.
† I wasn't a supporter on this for complicated reasons.
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.
> camera:type fixed
> direction 340
> man_made surveillance
> surveillance:type ALPR
Which results in "Operated by: Unknown, Made by: Unknown". What am I supposed to do with that info I wonder. How would I find out if it's actually Flock or if law enforcement would actually have access to this particular camera.
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.
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
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.
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.
So it doesnt seems like a particularly egregious use of flock. It's just as egregious as it normally is, which is pretty egregious.
(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.
There is no handwaving away the moral implications of these technologies, and who they empower to do what to whom.
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.
"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452
Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M views), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
"Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)" (30 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
So the impetus is twofold:
- Funding provided by programs such as Operation Stonegarden and other grants
- Activists agitate for Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime --> The People clamor for Enhanced Security Measures and DIY
> Several criminals have been caught
The actual difference here is that the second "caught" isn't followed by "and released". The camera didn't do it.
My street has repeat offenders who come and steal from cars nightly. The cops know who they are and have arrested them multiple times, with them immediately being released AFAIK. A million cameras wouldn't change this.
So yes, the camera didn't do it, but it helped.
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.
It turns out other states do have flags for things like "extraditable warrant" vs. just failure to appear warrants (something mentioned in previous discussions), and perhaps something could be done about the LEADS system if attention was given to it. It seems like fixing one's data sources is a great approach vs. tossing the baby out with the bathwater — unless of course that's the intention all along, as it is with many opposed to state-owned surveillance of this nature.
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.
That's a big assumption considering crime rates are already at lows
How do we come back from this?
It's time to go to your city council meeting and demand they do not use this technology. It was time yesterday.
If you speak in a public place you should expect to possibly be recorded. If you want to share a message with the public, you should cower when people receive it. If you want privacy, then protest somewhere private.
No. This is simply not accurate. They collected data on every single car that attended, but there easily could be more people at the protest that rode in the same car, lyft/uber, took a bus, walked, or any other methods of getting there without a car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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 an 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?
Please don't call out the boot on your neck.
You are making a scene.
Tsk. Tsk.
Either way, we're still just making a shit sandwich and arguing over the condiments.