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

by pkaeding • 8 months ago

314 231 8 months ago

habinero• 8 months ago

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.

Simulacra• 8 months ago

Sounds like social media ;-)

RobRivera• 8 months ago

Lmao I got honeypotted in h.s. by one of those 'does your crush like you' astrology sites

alilikestech• 8 months ago

Lol I actually tried it with my plate, i hope i don't get SWATed

MangoToupe• 8 months ago

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.

AdmiralAsshat• 8 months ago

With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?

rogerrogerr• 8 months ago

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.

CamperBob22• 8 months ago

Sell it to the cops and/or ICE as belonging to "self-identified persons of interest."

pests• 8 months ago

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.

ccgreg3• 8 months ago

Most people park at their home and many drive to work. If you have both of those data points, you can identify people.

amazingman• 8 months ago

Checksum?

dragonwriter• 8 months ago

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.

edm0nd• 8 months ago

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.

JohnFen2• 8 months ago

In many states, car registration data is public information. If you have a license plate number, you can easily look up who the car is registered to, where they live, etc. License plate numbers are PII.

potato37328425• 8 months ago

Flag you as being worth watching, or up your composite score by a point or whatever.

mikkupikku• 8 months ago

Suppose the guy behind this website keeps a log of the requests, even accidentally, and eventually gets bought out by Flock themselves (websites critical of companies selling out is unfortunately common). Now Flock has a list of plates of people alert to flock and this gets added to your Palintir threat matrix, so the next time a cop pulls you over for some minor infraction his computer can prime him to be jumpy and trigger happy by labelling you as a potential dissident.

boomboomsubban• 8 months ago

They list their sources, if you care but don't trust them you could replicate it on your own.

hopelite5• 8 months ago

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.

blitzar• 8 months ago

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

boringg• 8 months ago

100% always feels like a trap.

onetokeoverthe• 8 months ago

just enter 10 license numbers.

tptacek11• 8 months ago

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".

calvinmorrison2• 8 months ago

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.

tptacek11• 8 months ago

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.

dehrmann2• 8 months ago

Would they be subject to CCPA, then?

FireBeyond4• 8 months ago

Yeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws.

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."

hopelite5• 8 months ago

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.

diydsp4• 8 months ago

Rule 1. Do not comply in advance. Do not accept it as inevitable. Do not give away your power without friction.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 8 months ago

tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".

mycall• 8 months ago

* While our most recent data is from 12/4/2025, there may be significant historical gaps.

* Most agencies don't proactively publish audit logs Records requests can take months or years to fulfill Some agencies heavily redact their logs

* We may not have requested logs from your local agencies yet

sp332• 8 months ago

In New Hampshire, we banned both public and private ALPRs. You can see on the map that the only ones are at toll booths. Those got explicit exemptions in the law.

dehrmann2• 8 months ago

Isn't that the state with license plates that say "live free or die?" Unless, of course, you have a moral objection to that statement, cf. Wooley v. Maynard.

hibf6• 8 months ago

You're right that the dataset is incomplete, but it contains searches done by police, not plates read by Flock.

The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.

tptacek11• 8 months ago

I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.

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

rahimnathwani2• 8 months ago

  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

It's not a dataset of license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras. It's a dataset of license plate numbers that have been entered into search tools.

  Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.

tptacek11• 8 months ago

Yeah, and Illinois law defines that as "ALPR data" and restricts its disclosure.

user3939382• 8 months ago

Can’t wait for the Flock Equifax/SouthParkWereSorry-esque breach announcement any day. I should start a betting pool w my friends.

pilingual2• 8 months ago

If YouTube personalities can break into the hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if foreign intelligence has already figured out a way. Clownin

hopelite5• 8 months ago

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.

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

Why should I care if some low-ranking party official in China knows where I drive, when my actual government will use that data to deport me if I sufficiently piss it off?

bigbuppo3• 8 months ago

I've got $10 on compromised six months before they had their first customer.

khannn• 8 months ago

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

Pikamander2• 8 months ago

No worries; after Flock gets breached, you'll be compensated with one free year of their services.

kotaKat2• 8 months ago

My breach compensation will be my choice of 3 Flock Cameras from any location in the US with a pole saw.

opengrass• 8 months ago

Have I ran out of 100,000 requests?

WalterSear• 8 months ago

Does your significant other know about your car collection? You may have a car hoarding problem.

pilingual2• 8 months ago

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.

johnebgd• 8 months ago

Dystopian society.

VoidWhisperer• 8 months ago

This unfortunately wouldn't work quite as well in states where cars arent required to have a front facing license plate (like florida)

kmoser• 8 months ago

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.

overfeed• 8 months ago

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.

potato37328425• 8 months ago

That'd be a great place to test one's plate for legibility to the toll and speed cameras.

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

How about we hold our leaders accountable?

bix6• 8 months ago

Interesting I can’t access this over VPN

ccgreg3• 8 months ago

Well, yeah. Clownflare

mfkp• 8 months ago

Seems like the website has ran out of cloudflare worker credits on their plan:

  Please check back later
  Error 1027
  This website has been temporarily rate limited

nh43215rgb• 8 months ago

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.

xer0x• 8 months ago

Cloudflare making sites unavailable?

tossit444• 8 months ago

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.

beeflet• 8 months ago

Have I been cloudflare'd?

GaryBluto• 8 months ago

Slashdotted within 3 hours.

asveikau• 8 months ago

Now there's a term I haven't heard in a while

ChrisMarshallNY• 8 months ago

Yup.

Nowadays, we say “hugged to death.”

kazinator• 8 months ago

Have I been flocculated? Check your social security number to see whether you are considered pond scum.

jmward01• 8 months ago

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.

7e• 8 months ago

You have no right to privacy in public, at least in the US.

__del__• 8 months ago

clarity is good. i believe that was a reference to the futility of posting "i do not consent" messages on social media.

edot• 8 months ago

But don’t I have a right to not get stalked?

diydsp4• 8 months ago

That is oft-repeated, but case law is starting to show it's not strictly true:

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).

ifh-hn3• 8 months ago

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?

KomoD• 8 months ago

"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/

stanac• 8 months ago

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

reactordev3• 8 months ago

https://deflock.me

lillecarl2• 8 months ago

This is dystopian as fuck

jeroenhd2• 8 months ago

That website is a bit misleading, their "worldwide" map includes ALL ALPR cameras, not just the ones operated by Flock or for-profit surveillance companies.

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.

iso16316• 8 months ago

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?

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"

rescripting• 8 months ago

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.

slickdifferent• 8 months ago

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.

Spooky234• 8 months ago

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.

Workaccount22• 8 months ago

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.

airstrike• 8 months ago

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

FireBeyond4• 8 months ago

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.

EasyMark2• 8 months ago

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.

gotekom952• 8 months ago

Very problematic flock security video - how easy is to hack them https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?si=vC2Kyl_e30kVVmXT

dev_l1x_be• 8 months ago

Have I been HNed? [Yes] No

BlarfMcFlarf• 8 months ago

I mean, we already had PRISM, why is anyone acting like this is a big deal?

basilgohar• 8 months ago

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.

xboxnolifes• 8 months ago

Because prism is a big deal too.

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

There can be multiple big deals at once.

ourmandave• 8 months ago

Visit deflock.me/map to see if you live near a camera.

https://deflock.me/map

iJohnDoe• 8 months ago

Holy shit! I had no idea they were everywhere!

Do they get permission or permit to install them?

blamazon• 8 months ago

Some are installed on private property, and supply data to the property owner. Some are installed on public property, and supply data to the government.

chzblck5• 8 months ago

Oh no my super secret license plate! definitely something that is normally hidden instead of being on the front and back of my car for anyone to see and photo.

dietr1ch• 8 months ago

Sure, but now there's a highly vulnerable network of cameras that reports wherever you pass to everyone way beyond the few people that saw you go around.

chzblck5• 8 months ago

Okay? so what. People can see that I drive? do you not think that verizon/ att /google cant see where you traveling by the phone you carry?

phyzome2• 8 months ago

"Oh no, my super secret movement data, which is now being made available to a large number of people" would be more accurate.

chzblck5• 8 months ago

Oh no lots people can now see that I go to costco and publix.

chzblck5• 8 months ago

Downvote all you want but adtechs like magnite, ttd, and applovin Have way more personal data on you and use it to influence. I'll take safety over ads any day of the week.

driverdan• 8 months ago

It's not one or the other. Everyone should be opposed to both.

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

Psst, hey, we hate all of those, too. Hating one shitty surveillance-state service doesn't preclude hating other shitty surveillance-state services.

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

Oh no, my bad faith argument!

The_President2• 8 months ago

Flock creates a dossier that allows an individual to be stalked and framed. This permits rouge users clamoring for more power to consolidate their toolkit and expedite their rise.

People get framed and stolen from all the time and this will certainly make it worse.

herpdyderp• 8 months ago

Are you talking about the linked website or Flock itself?

The_President2• 8 months ago

fixed

amelius3• 8 months ago

License plate numbers are old fashioned. Can't we get something more secure? E.g. plate numbers that change every hour would be a good start. I don't like to drive around with a giant cookie strapped to my car.

nxm2• 8 months ago

Great, more expensive electronic crap in/on the car to break...

amelius3• 8 months ago

You can say the same about a line of code.

tjwebbnorfolk• 8 months ago

The whole point of plastering a giant UID on your vehicle is so that it can be identified. Security isn't the purpose here.

amelius3• 8 months ago

But the point is that security _can_ be addressed, while still allowing the vehicle to be identified.

hellothereworld• 8 months ago

You can search with „OUTATIME“. For any non-americans lurking in the comments.

DivingForGold• 8 months ago

A met a guy once whom drives a PU truck, he lowers the tailgate and places an oversized piece of plywood in the bed as an excuse, he also places an opaque plastic cover over his front lic plate, which has been raised to a $300 fine in Texas, if caught. He now intends to place a series of bright strobe lights around his front plate to "bleach out" the sensors of these spy cameras.

morkalork• 8 months ago

Is his name Rusty Shackelford by any chance?

pxc• 8 months ago

He now intends to place a series of bright strobe lights around his front plate to "bleach out" the sensors of these spy cameras.

Isn't this a safety hazard?

DonHopkins• 8 months ago

Does he drive a hotdog shaped car?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLfAf8oHrMo

CamperBob22• 8 months ago

How does he plan to trigger the strobe lights?

dwoldrich2• 8 months ago

Now imagine every other aspect of modern life is enshittified similarly to some extent and all being dialed up. Nothing is sacred, and talk to the contrary is laughable. Government is a scummy grift, every big (money) cause is full of unaudited scammers. I hope you are never passionate about a pet government policy!

You can buy local or do it yourself, but all of those are squeezed at the margins by enshittified inputs.

Before even seeking to fix the problem, I try to work on me.

First, I try (difficult) to not be sucked into useless wallowing, which keeps me exactly where the enemy wants me to be. I tend to skim 'news' headlines now, if that.

Second, in my career I strive to produce uncommon quality so as to not add to the problem.

I love to stand out and feel proud of my work. It makes me sad when coworkers are concerned/confused when I put in extra effort. I know where they're coming from. No one notices nor cares at $megacorp, and my work is internal and humble.

I do it for self-improvement and to make the time I spend working for them worthwhile to me.

smackay• 8 months ago

You forgot to mention personal integrity and setting a good example to others.

dwoldrich2• 8 months ago

You make a great point! Setting a good example by being ambitious creates the Pygmalion Effect. The unavoidable contagion of repeated improvement making people hungry for more.

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

supportengineer2• 8 months ago

I believe that the full weight of the nations resources should come into play whenever there are missing or abducted people. CIA, NSA, satellites, all of it. I can’t fathom while we don’t do that already. But absent of that, Flock is the next best thing. Mainly because it reduces the friction to get this information in the hands of local law-enforcement officers. I have zero tolerance for crimes against children and fully support capital punishment for such.

analogpixel• 8 months ago

You guys really need to come up with at least ONE other reason to push every single policy besides "think of the children"; Just one to break it up a bit.

lillecarl2• 8 months ago

But think of the children!!?

supportengineer2• 8 months ago

Well, let me ask you this. What is your expectation from society if you or your family is personally affected?

venturecruelty9• 8 months ago

The vast, vast majority of child abduction cases are either a domestic dispute between parents, or someone the child knows (also usually a family member). This scaremongering needs to stop, especially when it's used to justify the rapid erosion of our liberties at the hands of an authoritarian government.

slicktux• 8 months ago

I’m curious; what database are they using? Or does Flock allow queries to their database?

dopidopHN2• 8 months ago

FOIA the records

hibf6• 8 months ago

Whenever anyone does a search in Flock's database, Flock sends the metadata to the related customers.

I.e., if someone does a statewide lookup in Nebraska, all Nebraska-based Flock customers receive the search metadata. Ostensibly, to be able to track if "their" ALPR data has been queried. Those audit logs are public record.

This is also how IL discovered out-of-state agencies were using data from Illinois for immigration enforcement (after FOIA by a citizen, of course; apparently none of the IL law enforcement agencies audited their data for unlawful activity).

dieselgate• 8 months ago

Cool website, gave it a go. I am not a general advocate of license plate tracking but believe it’s a double edge sword. A former vehicle was stolen and recovered twice - likely due to tracking technology.

beAbU• 8 months ago

Cars can have tracking devices installed that remain dormant until remotely activated by the owner in case of theft.

This is how Netstar and Tracker does it in South Africa. To massive success. So much so that a car without one of these installed is basically uninsurable.

There is no need for external 3rd party tracking.

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

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