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Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.

I think reducing crime and road safety is an excuse.

There are true innovators in the traffic camera space but i think counties often choose vendors who give them best ROI.

The odds are 100% that it will be abused.

> Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.

Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.

It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.

The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.

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Download osm data, extract roads and surveillance, gpd overlay how=difference, remove/edit the different osmid's, write to pbf file, convert to obf file w/ osmandmapcreator, import into OsmAnd.

Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs on your phone.

Edit: link https://github.com/pickpj/Big-B-Router - I tend to find ALPRs that are missing in the OSM data, so keep on updating OSM data.

You should assume every police cruiser has a plate reader, too.

> It may technically be possible to route a drive around them

That's an interesting idea...

wow. quite literally the only ones in my area are surveilling the county park / community center. that's creepy. I'll just have to assume they're doing something creepier at the public library.

>> This is a quite scary map.

It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.

I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.

What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.

Lol, sure it is. Ridiculous.

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Yes, and according to Steve Ballmer (back in the day) Linux Torvalds was a terrorist. People are allowed to say stupid things.

Everydoor's UI is also quite nice for this. it even lets you enter in the orientation quite easily

https://every-door.app/

https://github.com/Zverik/every_door

And to think, all it cost was a significant loss of privacy nationwide

Home Depot didn’t have CCTV and loss prevention before Flock?

You can go onto Open Street Map and tidy up the data. I would recommend surveying the actual situation first to ensure you don't mess anything up.

Generally, only addicts steal from poorer people.

And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.

Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.

You can use https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance to delete the cameras from OSM

DeFlock is powered by crowdsourced data from the OpenStreetMap community. The map is incomplete! New locations are always being added. Know of a missing ALPR? Contribute to the map: https://deflock.org/report/id

When your car gets stolen, even with camera data, the police will not do anything.

On the "coordinated efforts" front, some anecdata:

Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were marked as removed within a few minutes.

Any other subject: posts fine.

Try it yourself and see what you get.

I think you overestimate the public.

Could be wrong but I don't think Flock makes speed trap or red light cameras. These are license plate readers that conduct constant surveillance of everyone at all times, whether or not you've broken any traffic laws.

Police just aren't doing their job in the US, who even knows what they're doing at this point. Basically no country had the post-covid driver issue as much as America. Some states basically halved fines lol, make them do their jobs.

> Running reds, extreme speed, escaping police are all common.

How do these cameras prevent those crimes?

> At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law

Don't make excuses for them. If you're legally allowed to kill people on purpose, you (should) get oversight and tight constraints. We don't because of a lot of reasons, but we should

They get paid six figure salaries for not actually doing a whole lot, they can manage.

If you know where some of them are, you can add the data yourself: https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance

Coming 2028: Dissent is a crime

Flock cameras aren't enforcing anything. They collect your license plate and distinguishing details of your car. It's just car X with plate Y detected at location Z at time T.

Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.

You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.