Engineer Builds ALPR Camera to Track Police Cars, Drawing Law Enforcement Visit
A Canadian developer constructed a custom license plate reader to log police vehicles, prompting officers to visit his home and voice privacy concerns.
Canadian software engineer and video creator Anthony Sistilli received a visit at his Brampton, Ontario residence from local law enforcement after building a custom automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera designed specifically to track police vehicles, according to a report from Hacker News (https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/canadian-youtuber-builds-flock-like-camera-to-exclusively-track-police-vehicles-officers-visit-his-home-to-express-privacy-concerns).
Two Peel Regional Police officers arrived at Sistilli's home on September 20 to question his intentions after he shared footage of the operational device online. According to Sistilli, the officers expressed concern that logging patrol cars could reveal where officers live, their shift schedules, and their movements throughout the day, creating personal safety risks.
Sistilli noted to the officers that their concerns mirror the privacy objections raised by ordinary citizens regarding expanding automated license plate reader deployments. When Sistilli proposed stronger policy guardrails for ALPR infrastructure, officers reportedly answered that such restrictions could leak details of active investigations to criminals.
The project was created as a countermeasure to commercial automated surveillance networks such as Flock Safety, a U.S. company that operates more than 120,000 ALPR cameras across 49 states and scans billions of vehicles each month. Independent researchers previously compiled a map documenting 335,701 Flock camera locations across North America.
Flock's cross-jurisdictional network has drawn sustained criticism from civil liberties groups, leading municipalities including Los Angeles and Fullerton to suspend or terminate their contracts. Public scrutiny has heightened following documented instances of database misuse by officers and a separate incident in which security researchers extracted 1.6 million images and more than 27,000 video clips from a stolen Flock camera.
Sources
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