License Plate Recognition with OpenCV 4 : Open Automatic License Plate Recognition (OpenALPR)
The short version: A coding tutorial on OpenALPR/Tesseract shows just how trivial it's become to build plate-reading tools — the same low barrier that let Flock Safety blanket the country in cameras.
Our Take
Credit to Francesco Piscani for a straightforward, honest tutorial: point OpenCV and OpenALPR at a video feed, layer in Tesseract for OCR, and you've got a working license plate reader. Nothing nefarious here — it's educational content for developers. But it's also a useful reality check for anyone who thinks ALPR technology is some exotic, tightly controlled capability. It isn't. The core pieces are open source, well-documented, and can be assembled by a single person in an afternoon.
That matters because it explains how we got here. If a hobbyist can stitch together plate recognition from free libraries, imagine what a company with venture funding, law enforcement contracts, and thousands of networked cameras can do. Flock Safety didn't invent some unbreakable black-box technology — they scaled a fairly common computer vision pipeline into a nationwide surveillance dragnet, then wrapped it in a subscription model and sold it to every HOA and police department that would sign up. The technical barrier was never the problem. The absence of oversight, retention limits, and public consent is.
Videos like this are a good reminder that the fight against mass ALPR surveillance isn't about banning a mysterious algorithm — it's about controlling who gets to run cameras on public roads, how long they keep your data, and who they share it with. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and visit take action if you want to push back on unchecked plate reader deployment where you live.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Francesco Piscani, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.