posted in Technology
Week of action planned against license plate readers
More info: www.noalprs.com
spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/news/2026/08/17/alpr-week-of-action✊1
Please do not call these devices license plate readers. They are surveillance tools with capabilities that far exceed that of normal license plate reading devices. It’s like calling an RPG a spear.
I’m curious why the flock cameras are worse than the “traffic observation cameras” that went up on top of every traffic light in like 2007. I was pretty upset about those at the time, but I never found any other push back.
Not many people upset about the cop cars becoming mobile license plate readers either.
Here’s a good article this week on just one reason why Flock is terrible:
www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code
Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.
VEHICLE SURVEILLANCE GIANT Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.
Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.