Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."

Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.

edit: grammar

The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.

Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.

Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.

That is one aspect.

But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?

Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.

Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".

And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.

In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.

Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.

For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.

Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.

I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.

If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.

There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.

Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.

“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.

What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.

I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.

Nowadays, we say “hugged to death.”

See Mosaic + Carpenter case which say “Yes, each scan is public; yes, aggregation is different. "

Carpenter shows the Court recognizes that aggregated location data can be constitutionally significant.

Individual observability vs. systemic observation: A passerby can note a single plate at a single place/time. But a system of ALPRs, distributed spatially and continuous in time, indexed and retained, can map a person’s entire movements, associations, repeated visits, and behavioral patterns. That’s exactly the “mosaic” insight: the whole reveals things the pieces don’t. (Maynard / Jones reasoning).

I also find everyone is hungry for kudos. I recommend being very liberal and publicly vocal with genuine kudos if you have them!