The Growing Privacy Threat Of ALPR Surveillance Cameras. Steve Williamson and Mik Jordahl welcome Sandy Boyce and Laura Masters to discuss Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras operated by Flock Safety, and to explain why they helped convince Sedona to “de-Flock” the city.
Laura begins by describing how ALPRs work. She says that they are mounted at intersections and take very detailed still images of passing vehicles. She further explains: “They develop a vehicle fingerprint through Flock. The system does more than just read the license plate; it uses machine learning identifying and cataloging specific vehicle details. It captures the license plate and the state. It captures the vehicle type whether it’s a sedan, truck, SUV – the make, the model and the color. It also captures characteristics unique to that vehicle, like if you have a roof rack, a bumper sticker, car damage. The second part of it is the data transmission and storage. It’s immediately uploaded to a secure, encrypted cloud server…the authorized users can search the data by any captured criteria. The system continuously compares captured license plates against federal and state databases.”
Boyce adds, “There isn’t any real transparency on reporting how many cameras are in use in a certain locality. But there is a website that’s a citizen-run website called deflock.me. As of right now, there are residence-mapped 66,441 of the ALPRs in the country.” (EDIT: As of this posting, that number has grown to 70,572.)