These have gotten more controversial in recent months, due to their indiscriminate large scale data collection, with 404 Media publishing many original pieces (https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/) about their adoption and (ab)use across the country. I wanted to use open source datasets to track the rapid expansion, especially per-county, as this data can be crucial for 'deflock' movements to petition counties and city governments to ban and remove them.
In some counties, the tracking becomes so widespread that most people can't go anywhere without being photographed. This includes possibly sensitive areas, like places of worship and medical facilities.
The argument for their legality rests upon the notion that these cameras are equivalent to 'mere observation', but the enormous scope and data sharing agreements in place to share and access millions of records without warrants blurs the lines of the fourth amendment.
I don't know the solution, but I do know that in the US we've lost 10-15 years of progress when it comes to traffic fatalities.
The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem.
It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help.
There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.
That means that you have a right to trial/appeal, and the accuser (the cop) needs to show up, if you request a trial.
Traffic cameras can't accuse you of a crime, so they are considered civil infractions (no points, but also means they are a bitch to appeal). They can issue realtime civil citations, though.
ALPRS can't do either. They are forensic tools; not enforcement tools.
I believe in the UK, a camera can convict you of a crime, so they can issue severe tickets. They wouldn't really be able to do that, in the US.
In my county (Suffolk, NY), they just stopped all the redlight cameras. I doubt they would do so for ALPRs.
Also, I think some ALPRs are private. There's a shopping center, not too far from here, that's in a relatively high-crime neighborhood. They have cameras and ALPRs, all over the parking lots.
Someone going 40 in a 30 and swerving around other cars gets treated the same as someone going 40 when the road is empty. Someone slowing to 1-2mph before safely rolling through a stop sign get the same ding as someone blowing through it at 30mph.
If AIs can somehow learn how to take all this footage and enforce the spirit of the law (citing dangerous driving) instead of the letter I will fully support it.
I can’t think of a way to implement this that wouldn’t ban passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle. Which could be even a bus or limousine.
I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.
If they really wanted to push this they could do it directly in the baseband chipset and bypass the OS entirely when deciding to lock down the device to some kind of "travel mode" with limited functionality (such as no texting or no browser)
Not that I'm advocating for that sort of thing, but it's good to keep in mind that we don't really own the cellular devices we pay for and that even in the rare case we have root we can't stop them from doing what they want to our devices as long as they control the closed hardware.
I agree with the other poster about this being more workable in a fictional society with different shared values.
Police can't substantially increase enforcement overall because that would just cause bad political optics, say nothing of stops that needlessly escalate to being newsworthy in a bad way. They'd necessarily issue a hundred petty bullshit tickets for every deserved ticket for legitimately bad behavior. It just wouldn't work. It would be like trying to plow a field with the ripper on the back of a bulldozer. It kinda looks similar but it's wrong for the job.
And all of this is based on the assumption that we're trying to enforce things that the broad public agrees need strict enforcement, not whatever the original comment wants.
Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways.
In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.
my local middle school has their school zone on:
1. four lane highway
2. dedicated turning lanes
3. major thru-way between shops, apartments, and the rest of the city
4. great visibility
this is a recipe for 50mph. the speed limit is 25mph. If you do the speed limit, you WILL be tailgated. If you do ~35, you're risking a ticket. There will still be people doing 45-50 and weave through the lanes.
also in my town, the main thru-way is a route dating back to the 30s. There are red lights at major intersections and they WILL turn red even if no one is there. They're designed to slow people down. HOWEVER if you speed and run a yellow light, you'll hit ALL the lights green! It shaves significant time off your trip, is easier on your car, is more enjoyable, and requires less attention. It's a system designed to make people speed and run reds.
Where I used to live, I could get from one side of the city to the other in a maximum of 30 minutes. the lights were designed to keep traffic flowing at 30-35mph. It ENCOURAGED you to go no faster, or you'll have to slow down and come to a stop. This also kept traffic flowing so you felt like you HAD to focus on driving. They also did things to encourage bicycles and make things safer for pedestrians.
> but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.
Local governments have extra money from property price bubble increasing tax revenues.
At the same time there are great open source image analysis models for companies to put on a pole using cheap android hw and a solar panel and make bold claims about solving all crime, then they can sell that data again to 3rd parties like insurance. Also can start buying access to more video feeds from ring cameras etc and resell that. They'll hire someone to make a ux to integrate it into PDs later, for a premium of course.
My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023.
Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.
How about we build better infrastructure and regulate vehicles since those do actually stop this behavior. Most of those red lights and stoplights in the US should be roundabouts. Narrower lanes and other traffic calming measures should be much more pervasive. Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control.
Compare US traffic and pedestrian deaths to the rest of the world, or at least a lot of EU countries. Its embarrassing.
Many manufacturers are now selling pre-lifted trucks. Here in Texas around a third of the vehicles on the road are pickup trucks, and about half of those have been lifted beyond standard height either from the factory or aftermarket, another third of vehicles are SUVs, most of which are significantly larger than necessary to be fit for purpose for the driver and occupants.
This situation was /caused/ by government regulation and it can be fixed by government regulation. It's absolutely absurd the gargantuan vehicles most people drive in the US, and the fact that we let people turn their vehicles into monster trucks and then operate them on public roads with impunity. I don't care how small someone's dick is, they don't get the right to drive a truck down the highway that can literally drive /over/ a modern standard sedan/hatchback. The continuing absurdity has turned into an iterated prisoner's dilemma which has resulted in more and more people buying SUVs and crossovers who by every measure do NOT need them. Absolutely is out of control, and it negatively impacts everyone, including the drivers of these vehicles.
It usually takes about 5 minutes of driving to observe someone doing something that I would pull them over for. I don't think cops need all this automated surveillance, they just need to drive around and be proactive.
We could of had a system where we used the technology we already had in our hands to democratize speed enforcement, instead of corporatizing it
Frankly, I think it's a miracle that nobody has been beaten into a coma or killed over NYC's bounty program yet.
'Weird, I got this footage here from another angle and it shows you did. We also got the data from your car. You were speeding son.'
The solution, as always, is better infrastructure and support at multiple levels, not beating everybody with a stick.
I could see having a cop and a camera stationed in a place working as a spotter that then radios to other cops up ahead to pull over in an old school speed trap set up. However, that would take a lot of man power and coordination that I doubt most departments would care to do. We've seen plenty of YT videos of people trying to make a point of catching distracted drivers. The cops just need to give a shit, and want to do something about it.
So yeah, you're reducing speeding, number go up, pat yourself on the back. But you're also increasing the incidence of something rarer than speeding, but way worse.
This is the same problem that 4-way stops at roads that don't deserve them create, you're basically teaching people that the signage is bullshit.
It'd be cool if more roads were implemented that way.
I walk my kids to school, but when I do drive the 1.1 miles there are no less than 12 stoplights/stop signs.
The problem is that knocking the magic number on the sign down by 5-15 and then simply not enforcing it too seriously results in less screeching Karens harassing the politicians who then harass the bureaucracy than taking a hard line about "well akshually this is the engineered speed for the road".
People unable to recognize this and only driving by the feels are the problem. Hand wavy comments like yours suggesting using the feels as being okay do not help the situation
Your comment is literally the principal Skinner "no it's everyone else who's wrong" meme.
Regardless of what you think, speed limits are not set in place just to ruin your day because you can’t leave on time and constantly need to “make up time”. They are not arbitrary decisions just because you haven’t considered all of the factors involved.
How many roads are 35 when they should be 50 simply because some local yokel asshole made a stink at city counsel 10 years ago and now it's impossible to change?
War is peace.
Surveillance is safety.
Your opinions are directly counterproductive on these petty issues. You ask for the state to use the jackboot. The jackboot just makes people hate the state and think in terms of "will I get caught". If not for you people trying to force compliance on this, that and the next thing the state would be in higher standing in people's minds and voluntary "when it matters" or "because it's the right thing to do" compliance would be higher. Sure, we could add more jackboot, but that costs money and no democratic-ish system is gonna allocate a bunch of money to do stuff everyone hates.
My observation has been that the danger increase is a combination of three things:
1. Lack of situational awareness/awareness of surroundings. This manifests in various ways like improper merging, improper turns into traffic, turning across multiple lanes, and left-lane hogs.
2. Frustration becomes aggression. This also manifests in multiple ways, but primarily is seen through tail-gating (in response to left-lane hogs) and swimming through traffic (in response to left-lane hogs), as well as road-rage (mostly in response to the other misbehavior).
3. Constant distraction. I have seen SO MANY drivers literally watching videos on a tablet, playing games, or otherwise driving at high rates of speed (70mph+) while fully engaged in something other than driving. It's at epidemic proportions.
The issue is, by and large, not people doing rolling stops (which by the way have never been proven to cause an increase in accidents when performed properly) or speeding (generally, some exceptions like school zones do matter). Running red lights is definitely a problem that is more common place, and is likely a part of all 3 of these these.
I feel like to a large degree all of this is a symptom of a wider societial issue where everyone acts in selfish and self-centered ways, completely ignoring their impacts on others, and moving from moments to moments where they can engage with their phone/social-media, to the exclusion of all else. I don't think phones/social-media /caused/ the problem, I think it exacerbates it though. Every aspect of our society is worsening because the revealed behavior of our population is one of lack of care or outright disdain for everyone else around them and an absolute obsession with serving their own interests above all else. That this manifests in driving is unsurprising.
Speeding and running red lights can be combated without affecting the privacy of innocents on the road. A debate can and should be had about the placement of radar traps though, many are straight off highway robberies trapping people who don't notice a speed-limit sign that is visually hard to notice.
Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent decades. Driving was twice as dangerous in the 80's as it is now.
This is not a statistical anomaly that can be handwaved by pointing out that things were worse 40 years ago. Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
Sigh. I hate that phrasing. But OK, fine: you are misreading me, misanalysing the data, or just plain spinning to mislead readers.
Fatalities per capita and per mile driven go steadily downward until covid, and maybe there's a bump after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... If you have numbers (you don't cite any) showing otherwise, they are being polluted by demographic trends (the US having higher population growth doesn't say anything about driver behavior).
> Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
So spinning it is. Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025? Seems like "uniquely lethal" doesn't really constitute a good faith representation of the truth.
Anyway, not to pile on but you are absolutely incorrect. Forgive the phrasing.
> Per capita road accident deaths in the US reversed their decline in the early 2010s.
Amusing that you accuse me of bad faith framing and then pose a nonsense question like this:
> Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025?
I cannot time travel and neither can you. The comparison that matters is US in 2025 vs other developed nations in 2025, and with that framing the US is uniquely lethal.
Of course, a good faith reader of my comment would understand this, but we already know that's not you since you did the research and have decided to be wrong anyway.
The cyclist puts the stick between his spokes.
The cyclist lies on the road, cursing the government, for causing this.
If we wanted to solve this problem while retaining the benefits, what we'd do is have stiff penalties for warrantless retention and required yearly independent audits of systems.
Also, another answer to this is that there is no overarching goal; I just wanted to build a large scale data analysis pipeline for fun :) I am no stranger to side projects to distract me from finals unfortunately.
(This is not a negative comment about this post btw, more just commentary on how the fire hose of "look at how bad this is in excruciating detail" can be overwhelming.)
I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to verify/edit.
It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be protected under the fourth amendment.
The difference between ring cameras and paparazzi using a canon camera is that the photos recorded to film/local storage can't be automatically compiled with the footage captured from everyone else's canon camera to create databases of people and track their movements, activities, attributes, etc.
It really depends on where the data goes and who can access it. I'd even go so far as to say that keeping that data on the cloud is fine as long as the data is encrypted, amazon doesn't access it beyond storage and deliver to the customer (meaning that they can no longer mine it for personal data) and amazon cannot give access to anyone else (including police who should have to request footage directly from the camera owners).
The law doesn't make this distinction you're making. If you replace Canon with "iPhone/Android with cloud photo backup enabled" then your issue with Ring cameras applies to all smartphones. Maybe you'd prefer that not be the case, but it is.
In any case, I'd prefer we not get hung up on this lossy analogy since neither activity is restricted by current law which is my actual point.
It's not clear to me that photos taken with an iphone with cloud backup enabled are compiled into national databases that track people's movements like ring and flock cameras are today either.
Currently flock and ring cameras are tracking people at a scale that canon cameras just aren't. Therefore it is fair to blame Amazon and flock but not cannon for the manner in which amazon and flock uses the footage their cameras collect to violate our rights.
As with everything, there's much nuance to this "right".
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...
Imagining a universe where companies are also bound by that is an interesting thought exercise. Many products (cloud photo backup, foursquare style "check-ins," location sharing with friends, etc) would be simply impossible because the aggregated data amounts to comprehensive surveillance.
However I think there’s a significant difference between a single household and a centralised network of cameras across dozens of states.
For me the core issue of this is private enterprise holding gigantic amounts of PII, and the forms that is taking.
I’ve watched a lot of the coverage by Benn Jordan on Flock cameras and their inherent vulnerabilities, and it’s deeply concerning.
The applications of these technologies far outpaces appropriate checks and balances, and the increasing fusion between law enforcement, intelligence and private industry is largely ignored by the larger population.
Thanks for developing this, it’s important to visualise the virus-like spread of these technologies and see where it is concentrated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170302
(Repeating: in a few months sites like this will be replaceable with a static HTML page that says "yes, you've been tagged by an ALPR".)
For example, Kenosha County is in Wisconsin, not Illinois.
The strange implication is that they're watching the vet office traffic to find people who are getting treated by vets instead of doctors?
also my parish reports 0.0% across the board, and all the parishes near me. you have to get on the coast to get above 25%.
If you check deflock.me, would you say that 0.0% aligns with what you expect?
There's 6 cameras in the metro area per deflock.me, 3 at each Lowe's, and that's it. It's very easy to not get in range of those, at least on "my side" of the metro. How do we know that is all the ALPR in an area? Or rather, what's the confidence? I'd assume Home Depot would also have them, for example.
note: maybe i need to restart firefox, but deflock.me is the slowest "map" based site i've seen since keyhole in the late 90s
The quality of ALPR tagging does probably lag behind true counts - for example, Williamsburg, VA has 28 tagged on OSM, but 32 are listed in the transparency log (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/williamsburg-va-pd). Unfortunately not much can be done except spotting them out and about (or wardriving with a BLE beacon scanner: https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falco...)
Then I had an intrusive thought of a small squad of cybertruck 'enforcers' running around autonomously, tracking these drivers down via the live network of incoming video and doling out punishment to the chief offenders.
But how you model people actually driving each day and their paths? Because the accuracy of your conclusions seems to heavily depend on the accuracy of modelling.