ANPR cameras which the rest of the world (and apparently America) have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
It’s trivial for law enforcement to track your movement with ALPR cameras. Information feeds into a single database, paid for by law enforcement agencies, and they just connect the dots.
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.
Not yet. Facical recognition in 2025 is where LPR was in 2010.
As the cost of compute and wireless communications continues to drop, facial recognition will be prolific. There are more limitations with cameras, but AI will make it easy to backtrack movement to a place where they get a clean shot that can identify you.
As an example, the transit authority in NYC Metro was able to plug existing security feeds from trains into Amazon Rekognition to count heads, which feeds their ticketing app — you can see which carriages are full. As time goes on, they’ll become able to track the breadcrumbs individuals from seat to platform. (If not already)
Detectives do this manually today. I was on a jury where the purse snatcher was followed by various cameras until he got on a bus. They pulled the bus passes and tracked his pass back to his girlfriend.
It does. But more like “the black male with the red hoodie is here”
They don’t say “hibf just walked into the 7-11” yet. The Feds probably have a system that can do that for car passengers traveling on “drug corridors” (ie. I95) today.
Less popular because it’s not feasible for many. I live in MN. Biking 20mi to work when it’s -10F and in 6” of fresh snow on top of the 12” received so far this season just isn’t something that’s safe to do.
Please don’t make it seem like it’s a “popularity” thing; it’s a necessity thing.
Finland is a cold country with similar population count and larger area. For national domestic trips, 55% of people there use cars[1]. For MN i only found stats for MN metro area, but I’d expect public transport to be more developed there. The car usage is still 83%[2].
I bet the local community plows the roads but not the bike infrastructure, though? I get why, people probably drive more than bike.
But, in Canada, there are local communities that plow bike infrastructure and locals bike in their deep winter.
It's a chicken or egg problem of building infrastructure for users and users demanding infrastructure. It's not some fact of nature that it's impossible. Different communities have different priorities. So, necessity is a bit strong of a word.
Hardly anyone lives in MN - half the poulation of New York City alone.
The vast majority of Americans live in cities. Half live in just 8 metro-areas, just as the vast majority of Europeans live in cities. Europe is far more dispersed though.
First paragraph: reasonable, if ignoring that access it not likely to be unrestricted willy-nilly.
Second paragraph: not as reasonable given that Amazon likely comply without issue with us intelligence, and sell the data to third parties, which the police could just buy (similar has been done) to avoid consent or legal obstacles.
Third paragraph: out of nowhere, focus on police. No mention of intelligence agency staff or say Amazon staff doing the same thing.
Out of nowhere? The entire comment is talking about law enforcement (police) and law enforcement agencies (police departments) purchasing access to commercially owned surveillance databases. No warrant is required to use them, and in some cases that access is indeed "unrestricted willy-nilly."
Ah, you mean like if we had some sort of knowledgeable, impartial third-party to grant the police permissions. They could, get this, "judge" whether the absolute bare minimum of evidence is likely to exist. So long as Flock didn't provide a way to circumvent an approval process like that, you could maybe reduce the instances of abusers stalking their victims to "acceptable" levels.
What do you think the chances are that we could invent a system like that? You don't think Flock and the police would find a way to circumvent it do you?
I think it's mostly just a privacy issue. The idea that your every movement is being recorded by the government is Orwellian, especially when they try to hide its existence, lie about its capabilities, and you have no say in the matter (referencing NSA metadata monitoring). The average person thinks their ring camera is like their coffee maker, an individual piece of technology they own and control. If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too.
But these cameras have been around for 30+ years, including in the US. Why is it suddenly in the news.
The cameras don't track me either. They track a car. They have no idea who is driving the car.
> If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too
That's the interesting bit, how did ANPR get into the US public consciousness now, rather than over a decade ago when it started to be used on toll roads
They are being set up "for immigration purposes" but that's just a guise for a nation wide integrated system for cops and intel agencies to track every single American in every car down. They want keep an active, real time record of wherever we go and what patterns they exhibit for the algos to predict crime from anything they consider suspicious, possibly for future malicious purposes in a police state or just to see where their ex-wives are headed.
They’ve gotten cheaper and aggregated into nationwide networks. The older devices were expensive and in police car scenarios required pretty significant effort to install. The mobile flock just gets bolted to the dash.
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.
Unless I'm missing something, Ring cameras film people at my doorstep and are for my personal use, so dont know how they're similar at all even if you don't trust Amazon
Americans (the general public) are a lot more weary of government surveillance than other developed nations. Its one thing that you can get a lot of liberals and conservative to agree on.
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.
People install ring cameras which record me walking past. Those cameras then push the data to private companies for processing, and are made available to police on a simple request.
ANPR has been a thing for 30 years. Is America just slow on the uptake? Even then it looks like they've been in use for a long time there.
>and are made available to police on a simple request.
That's a "santa claus for adults" rumor.
Ring only complies with requests that they are legally obligated to. Otherwise users need to voluntarily share the footage, which more often than not they do.
> have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"