How would you know if it's there?

I ask rhetorically but I also imagine that at some point there will be an app that tells you and then people will vote with their dollars to the places that don't have them.

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yesfitz 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DeFlock already tracks ALPRs in private businesses' parking lots. https://maps.deflock.org/

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gruez 15 hours ago | parent [-]

How do you know a camera is a ALPR camera? How reliable is the data, is it just random people's unvetted reports?

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paimapi 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://deflockilm.org/war-driving-for-flock-cameras/

I know a couple of very tech savvy crews that war-drive and collect data on ALPRs in my city and they were the ones who mapped most of our city back in the day. there's been a big post-50501 DeFlock movement, though, so it's possible that more recent results are lower quality backed by lower subject matter expertise but it's not hard to set-up a good-enough scanner with something like Flock-You: https://github.com/MaxwellDPS/Flock-You-Android

even then, Flock cameras are visually distinctive compared to the Clearview/Motorola solutions that are more traditionally orb-like or are just straight tube CCTV housing. if you see a long black camera attached to a black pole with a solar panel attached, 99.9% chance you've spotted a Flock camera: https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Flock_Safety_...

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giancarlostoro 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also, how do you account for cameras that are so well placed that nobody even notices them?

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paimapi 10 hours ago | parent [-]

pretty easily - with wifi and BLE scanning. it's not like there's a guy at Flock climbing every pole, sticking in a USB, and then trucking it back to home base

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/26/detecting-surveillance-camer...

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giancarlostoro 10 hours ago | parent [-]

What if the camera is fully wired? Maybe Flock is only wifi based, but other cameras can be 100% setup with ethernet...

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paimapi 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Is that how they work or are you just speculating wildly about things that are easily looked up in a few minutes?

	▲	giancarlostoro an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Flock is a new in this market, before Flock there were loads of cameras wired up because wifi was not considered reliable until recent times. I'm asking, how do you detect well placed, subtle wired cameras? My overall point being, these apps are only as good as long as Flock and others don't just go fully hardwired (which before Flock, many were!).

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mc32 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It won’t matter. Slow encroachment. Everyone has learned from Google that slow encroachment gets what you want.

Price sensitive folks going to dollar general, wal-mart, etc., are not going to go shop at whole foods (assuming they even differentiate), and for people who go to ikea or Lowe’s for home goods, it’s not like they’re going to drive 30 miles out of their way to avoid ALPRs.

We can get pols to not deploy them with public monies, but I think that’s all we can do.

	▲	cucumber3732842 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>We can get pols to not deploy them with public monies, but I think that’s all we can do. If we tighten the 4th through 8th amendment case law to reign in the current wild west that is civil enforcement by holding them to the same standards for data access and imposing of penalties that criminal enforcement is the problem would be a lot smaller because then the tracking would be mostly limited to private interests who simply want to screw you out of your money but you can mostly choose not to do business with or will open up themselves to being undercut if they take too much.