You would be better off pirating all of your music and buying just one piece of merch from an artist. These rogue foreign licensing agencies provide no real value, and in fact are functionally illegal and unrecognized outside of Ukraine. It's also highly unlikely much money flows back to the artists.
Ah, gotcha thanks for the heads up! I read that this site was legal and assumed that they managed to stay aboveboard by offering artists slightly more than they could get from Spotify or other streamers.
But seeing that they're operating under dubious licensing, it seems much more likely that this isn't the best way to go.
I was going to say that merch fulfilment isn't free either but I guess that's your point. A few dollars from a $50 t-shirt is significant compared to the infinitesimal fractions of a penny from streams.
The solution is to learn content that you actually use with some regularity in your life outside of the testing! If you're doing this for education, the payoff might be the exam; if you're doing it to learn things without some particular end goal, you'll have to make your own way to make it worth it.
The language learning app people could try scheduling monthly video chats with native speakers (swapping turns halfway through so it's mutually beneficial) and notice their proficiency improve.
haha, that's a great point. I need to find more ways to do that. Maybe I should put $targetlanguage songs on my playlists so I'll get happy as I'm able to recognize more and more
I can opt out of that, by not carrying a phone. I cannot opt out of public surveillance. Plus at least the gap between police -> tech companies typically adds some resistance, maybe a warrant, etc. With ALPR's police have immediate access without warrants to the nationwide network. It's far more ripe for abuse, yet is exactly what the police departments want; the only chance is local governance.
It’s so awesome to see more people making things to fight back against ALPRs. Deflock movements are gaining traction across the country and genuinely making progress at suspension or cancellation of contracts.
It’s because they tap into a primal fear that the Snowden revelations didn’t. It’s more obvious and visceral to know there’s a massive network of cameras watching everyone 24/7.
Not just that, but because people can see the devices themselves. It's not just some guy talking about bad things in Washington DC, you can see these things on rural roads in the middle of nowhere.
Are they? Work I was involved in was instrumental in getting our Flock contract cancelled. Meanwhile, all the surrounding municipalities have, over the last 2 quarters, acquired more ALPR cameras.
I'm certain that had the 2024 election gone a different way, we'd still have our Flock cameras.
It's definitely a push and pull; more are adopting it, but more are pushing back. The total amount is definitely still rising, though, but so is awareness.
There's Eugene and Springfield, OR; Cambridge, MA; a few in TX; Denver and Longmont, CO; Redmond, WA; Evanston and Oak Park, IL; etc.
I'm Oak Park (I helped write our ALPR General Order and the transparency reporting requirements that formed the case for killing the contract because it wasn't addressing real crime).
Oak Park is 4.7 square miles. All our surrounding munis have rolled out more ALPRs after we killed ours.
Further: because of the oversight we had over our ALPRs before, they weren't really doing anything, for something like 2 years. OPPD kept them around because they were handy for post-incident investigation. We effectively had to stop responding to alerts once our police oversight commission ran the numbers of what the stops were.
Which is to say: our "de-Flocking" was mostly cosmetic. We'd already basically shut the cameras down and cut all sharing out.
I definitely think there's something to be said for nuance; my county is one of the worst in my state for penetration [0] but according to their transparency log avoids many of the common criticisms of Flock, like data sharing, immigration enforcement use, etc [1].
I'm just happy for any sort of critical analysis or attention being brought to every municipality's use of this technology as so often people have no idea at all, though. Because there are a lot of counties which are far worse, and almost none of the public is even aware; I suspect there is at least some gap between people who would care if they knew, and people who care now.
No. The police chief was unhappy with the outcome.
I also didn't personally get the contract cancelled --- in fact, I (for complicated reasons) opposed cancelling the contract. But I can tell you the sequence of things that led to the cancellation:
1. OPPD made the mistake of trying to deploy the cameras as an ordinary appropriation, without direct oversight, which pissed the board off.
2. We deployed the cameras in a pilot program with a bunch of restrictions (use only for violent crimes, security controls, stuff like that) that included monthly transparency reports to our CPOC commission.
3. Over the pilot period, the results from the cameras weren't good. That wasn't directly the fault of the cameras (the problem is the Illinois LEADS database), but it allowed opponents of the cameras to tell a (true) story.
4. At the first renewal session, an effort was made to shut off the cameras entirely (I was in favor then!), but the police chief made an impassioned case for keeping them as investigative tools. We renewed the contract with two provisos: we essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts, and we cut off all out-of-state sharing.
5. Transparency reports about the cameras to CPOC continued to tell a dismal story about their utility, complicated now by the fact that we (reasonably) were not using them for alerting in the first place; we had something like 5 total stories over a year post renewal, and 4 of them were really flimsy. The cameras did not work.
6. Trump got elected.
7. A push to kill the cameras off once and for all came from the progressive faction of the board; Trump and the poor performance of the cameras made them impossible to defend.
8. OPPD turned off all sharing of camera data.
9. The board voted to cancel the contract anyways.
Just having the transparency report available to demonstrate that the cameras weren’t working seems like an important step. I’m working on trying to get this information myself for my local area. I do agree that the election moved the needle. Hopefully this generates a pro-privacy coalition that will be just as opposed to similar efforts when the blue ties are back in power.
I don't know. To me this seems like an energized minority trying to use technology to make a lot of noise; much like social media activism. In our city Flock cameras are very controversial but both the PD and transparency reports have shown benefits from Flock. We're not a wealthy, well-to-do suburb though. I imagine heavy ALPR presence is a lot more silly in those areas.
I don't model daily paths as in 'coffee before work, then groceries on the way home'; I do straight shots from residences to each of these amenities. I don't know of a better way to do it than this; any more complicated model that tries to model 'daily routines' risks losing simplicity, as well as straying too far from actual driving behavior, and my main goal is extremely simple statistics.
My goal is to provide actionable statistics for any 'deflock' movements in a certain county, by being able to point to specific statistics on surveillance. If even one motivated person uses my data to petition, I'll be happy; it doesn't have to be for the average person. There's tons of these movements, too. Deflock Olympia just succeeded: https://www.yelmonline.com/stories/commentary-olympia-joins-...
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.
Fair enough. I am sorry if my original post was too harsh or overly critical; my original thinking was simply that those would organize against surveillance are probably already aware of it, but perhaps this would be useful in the cases you mention, if the metrics could be used as "ammo", as you suggest.
Not too harsh at all! I just wanted to fill the gap between "man, those cameras seem to be everywhere" and "XX% of people are surveilled on the average commute". It's true that this is not a particularly ambitious project, just a small niche I wanted to fill.
Ah! This looks like a bug with cross-border calculations. Ideally it would not show a Rockland County, NJ - it might cross state borders to perform calculations but they should all have a 'home state' that matches to the right county. Thanks for the example case, I'll work on a fix
Vets/hospitals are far less common (and the former probably suffers from less tags as hospitals are more important) so the distance one must travel increases, so higher likelihood of crossing one. Especially compared to how common everything else is.
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 best thing you can do is keep an eye out and tag them manually. The second best is a FOIA to your county government - there's some good examples on deflock.me and templates on muckrack. But private ones are not going to be FOIA-able.
At least as per Carpenter v. United States, that data requires a warrant, not just any cop/LEO in the country typing in a license plate with reasoning as 'investigation'. That's a much better standard.
https://law.stackexchange.com/q/499, https://archive.is/EZ2U3
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