"Flock Safety" is a company that makes "ALPR" cameras (automated license plate recognition, in reality they go far beyond just reading license plates), they've been getting a lot of attention recently because people are worried about privacy and abuse.
Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
There is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers.
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
> at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
They de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance.
Put up billboards around metros with a license plate reader that queries this database with each passing car and announce "White Tesla Model Y XYZ-1234 You've been focked for: Inv"
Flock cameras are oriented to read rear plates. One would need a camera similarly configured + a billboard some distance in front, or perhaps 2 billboards, a 1-2 setup + payoff combo, the camera behind the first billboard, and the dynamic text on the second. Pulling up other public data correlated to the plate - where legal - may make a splash. I'm thinking addressing the car owner by their first name.
No, Workers free tier is 100,000 requests/day. Considering the error is on the main page, each visit is probably taking a minimum of 10+ requests, so it can easily be overwhelmed.
It's a big deal even if it's been happening for a while. It should not be something we shrug our shoulders to and move on. These are stepping stones to a greater police state.
I love these kinds of sites, since they're indistinguishable from honeypots. Sure, have my license plate and the information that I'm worried about being watched.
> With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?
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.
Sure, and so what? You can look up people on Accurint without license plates. Depending on what kind of account you have, you can just search by a zip code, or a state with no further identifiers.
What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?
Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them.
This is intentionally not PII. You accept this burden when you decide to register a vehicle.
Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.
Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.
Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?
Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?
In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.
No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.)
In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable.
You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL
Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.
The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
"Wait, user compliance scan identified location traces associated with participitation in community groups prohibited by EasyLife Health™ policy update 2025-12-06b. Recommend to annul contract."
Wait really? I feel like this was happening in the 90s. Now every car has a full gps spy system integrated to the point I barely trust that my conversation is private in a modern vehicle. But I guess if you think it's just your car company, Android, Apple, roadside assistance, the local police, and probably the music you're playing that can pin your location you're probably ok.
LinkedIn has always struck me like a kind of contemporary slave management/market place, only one in which pick-mes try to be the best alpha slave they can be.
The fact that you are linked in, as in a chain, sure does not help with dispelling my impression.
I totally understand your sentiment, but you could just check a random assortment of license plate numbers you collected while driving around, which also includes yours. At the very least that would effectively obfuscate your license plate sufficiently that it could not be attributed beyond other methods that likely already have done so.
Hello, we at Flock are very sad to announce that your data was leaked, but due to the fact that we operate in a legal grey area to get around laws and are nothing more than the domestic surveillance equivalent to a PMC operating overseas, we invite you get fucked
Why would they break into individual hardware when they have unfettered access to the whole system in certain countries’ cases and can likely just hack into it in more adversarial cases? It is one of the several reasons why … yes, I know YC backed and funded Flock … the company and everyone in government that contracts for them to provide this mass surveillance service, is objectively and inherently treasonous. But don’t shoot the messenger just because people don’t like the message.
“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.
Since the page is currently down and I have no idea what flocked means in the context of license plates, can I assume this is US specific?
"Flock Safety" is a company that makes "ALPR" cameras (automated license plate recognition, in reality they go far beyond just reading license plates), they've been getting a lot of attention recently because people are worried about privacy and abuse.
There's a bunch of articles about them here: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
I would also recommend Benn Jordan's YT channel, he has a couple of videos covering flock cameras. His latest one is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
edit: grammar
I love Benn Jordan. If you liked this one, go check out the one where he stores a JPEG inside of a living bird.
https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?si=K_TGBR6FNpjI0qFk
https://deflock.me
Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
Rule 1. Do not comply in advance. Do not accept it as inevitable. Do not give away your power without friction.
There is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers.
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
What's your point? To the extent they're a private company you're even less likely to get access to records from Flock ALPR cameras.
Just because the records created on behalf of the government are held by a private enterprise doesn't mean they aren't government records.
Right, I agree. My point is that the FOIA laws of many states forbid disclosing the data this web page purports to surface.
Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know.
eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold.
I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging.
> at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
They're not a public body, that was my point
They de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance.
This feels a lot like "Yeah, but we'll do it anyways until a court makes us stop; because the profit is more than the fine"
but thry're not literally the government and the relevant laws only affect the literal government.
Put up billboards around metros with a license plate reader that queries this database with each passing car and announce "White Tesla Model Y XYZ-1234 You've been focked for: Inv"
What a sick society we live in.
This unfortunately wouldn't work quite as well in states where cars arent required to have a front facing license plate (like florida)
The camera could be separate from the billboard, and point at the backs of the cars. The billboard would be a short distance past that.
Flock cameras are oriented to read rear plates. One would need a camera similarly configured + a billboard some distance in front, or perhaps 2 billboards, a 1-2 setup + payoff combo, the camera behind the first billboard, and the dynamic text on the second. Pulling up other public data correlated to the plate - where legal - may make a splash. I'm thinking addressing the car owner by their first name.
Dystopian society.
> You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.
> If you are owner of this website, prevent this from happening again by upgrading your plan on the Cloudflare Workers dashboard.
Cloudflare making sites unavailable?
No, Workers free tier is 100,000 requests/day. Considering the error is on the main page, each visit is probably taking a minimum of 10+ requests, so it can easily be overwhelmed.
This is genius if you work in B2C and want to prevent your website from going viral.
Does Cloudflare let you set hard limits when you are on a paid plan? Or they just do it for the free tier?
Have I been cloudflare'd?
Slashdotted within 3 hours.
Now there's a term I haven't heard in a while
Yup.
Nowadays, we say “hugged to death.”
Hacker-Noosed
Very problematic flock security video - how easy is to hack them https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?si=vC2Kyl_e30kVVmXT
Have I ran out of 100,000 requests?
Does your significant other know about your car collection? You may have a car hoarding problem.
I mean, we already had PRISM, why is anyone acting like this is a big deal?
It's a big deal even if it's been happening for a while. It should not be something we shrug our shoulders to and move on. These are stepping stones to a greater police state.
I wonder if I got a license plate holder that said 'I do not consent to selling my position information' if I could sue them.
You have no right to privacy in public, at least in the US.
clarity is good. i believe that was a reference to the futility of posting "i do not consent" messages on social media.
I love these kinds of sites, since they're indistinguishable from honeypots. Sure, have my license plate and the information that I'm worried about being watched.
Reminds me of the (legit) form to claim compensation for a privacy leak.
Put in your name, address, phone number, dob, ssn and bank details - we will post you a cheque for $2.50
With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?
> With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?
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.
You just work backwards.
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.
Sure, and so what? You can look up people on Accurint without license plates. Depending on what kind of account you have, you can just search by a zip code, or a state with no further identifiers.
What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?
Pairing IPs to persons?
You can just get an API which does that and skip the middle steps?
Or even skip the API part and just buy that data in bulk. Or just collect it from a variety of freely leaked databases.
Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them.
This is intentionally not PII. You accept this burden when you decide to register a vehicle.
Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.
Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.
Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?
Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?
In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.
PS Hello from Grand Rapids!
> Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address)
If the car is leased, wouldn’t this just give leasing company details?
No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.)
In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
Ah thanks.
Permanent rental it is then. :)
That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable.
You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL
Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.
The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
Most people park at their home and many drive to work. If you have both of those data points, you can identify people.
That's not very useful?
For homeowners, the real estate transactions are public and majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts.
So, from home and work, you identify me. Then you figure out which church I attend, and which strip club I attend.
"Wait, user compliance scan identified location traces associated with participitation in community groups prohibited by EasyLife Health™ policy update 2025-12-06b. Recommend to annul contract."
You're starting with the plate, getting the home, and then you can get the real estate info.
Most people don't expect their identity to be discoverable from their driving.
Wait really? I feel like this was happening in the 90s. Now every car has a full gps spy system integrated to the point I barely trust that my conversation is private in a modern vehicle. But I guess if you think it's just your car company, Android, Apple, roadside assistance, the local police, and probably the music you're playing that can pin your location you're probably ok.
Isn't that the whole idea of licence plates? So you're identifiable?
> majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts.
What a time to live in!
LinkedIn has always struck me like a kind of contemporary slave management/market place, only one in which pick-mes try to be the best alpha slave they can be.
The fact that you are linked in, as in a chain, sure does not help with dispelling my impression.
Exactly - you can collect license plates numbers way easier than this. The best data they can really get is a connection to an IP address.
Checksum?
Sell it to the cops and/or ICE as belonging to "self-identified persons of interest."
Surely this implies that the easiest route to pedophilia is to join ICE
They list their sources, if you care but don't trust them you could replicate it on your own.
Lmao I got honeypotted in h.s. by one of those 'does your crush like you' astrology sites
I totally understand your sentiment, but you could just check a random assortment of license plate numbers you collected while driving around, which also includes yours. At the very least that would effectively obfuscate your license plate sufficiently that it could not be attributed beyond other methods that likely already have done so.
Who isn't worried about being watched? I am certainly not confident the government can tell their ass from their face, so anyone could be suspect.
Sounds like social media ;-)
Lol I actually tried it with my plate, i hope i don't get SWATed
Seems like the website has ran out of cloudflare worker credits on their plan:
Interesting I can’t access this over VPN
Well, yeah. Clownflare
Have I been HNed? [Yes] No
Can’t wait for the Flock Equifax/SouthParkWereSorry-esque breach announcement any day. I should start a betting pool w my friends.
No worries; after Flock gets breached, you'll be compensated with one free year of their services.
Hello, we at Flock are very sad to announce that your data was leaked, but due to the fact that we operate in a legal grey area to get around laws and are nothing more than the domestic surveillance equivalent to a PMC operating overseas, we invite you get fucked
I've got $10 on compromised six months before they had their first customer.
If YouTube personalities can break into the hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if foreign intelligence has already figured out a way. Clownin
Why would they break into individual hardware when they have unfettered access to the whole system in certain countries’ cases and can likely just hack into it in more adversarial cases? It is one of the several reasons why … yes, I know YC backed and funded Flock … the company and everyone in government that contracts for them to provide this mass surveillance service, is objectively and inherently treasonous. But don’t shoot the messenger just because people don’t like the message.
“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.
Have I been flocculated? Check your social security number to see whether you are considered pond scum.
just enter 10 license numbers.