Posted by sodality2 12/10/2025
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.
The strange implication is that they're watching the vet office traffic to find people who are getting treated by vets instead of doctors?
also my parish reports 0.0% across the board, and all the parishes near me. you have to get on the coast to get above 25%.
If you check deflock.me, would you say that 0.0% aligns with what you expect?
There's 6 cameras in the metro area per deflock.me, 3 at each Lowe's, and that's it. It's very easy to not get in range of those, at least on "my side" of the metro. How do we know that is all the ALPR in an area? Or rather, what's the confidence? I'd assume Home Depot would also have them, for example.
note: maybe i need to restart firefox, but deflock.me is the slowest "map" based site i've seen since keyhole in the late 90s
The quality of ALPR tagging does probably lag behind true counts - for example, Williamsburg, VA has 28 tagged on OSM, but 32 are listed in the transparency log (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/williamsburg-va-pd). Unfortunately not much can be done except spotting them out and about (or wardriving with a BLE beacon scanner: https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falco...)
But how you model people actually driving each day and their paths? Because the accuracy of your conclusions seems to heavily depend on the accuracy of modelling.
For example, Kenosha County is in Wisconsin, not Illinois.