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

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_...

▲

giancarlostoro 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

▲

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...

▲

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...

▲

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!).