App for Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)

Our Take

Siddhartha Bhattacharya's walkthrough on building an ANPR app isn't a surveillance exposé — it's a coding tutorial. But that's exactly why it matters to us. When a single developer can sketch out the logic for automatic plate recognition in a blog post and a video, it underscores just how low the technical bar has fallen for this kind of tracking. Flock Safety and its corporate peers aren't selling some rare, exotic capability; they're packaging a well-understood computer vision problem into a subscription service and a lobbying pitch to city councils.

That's worth sitting with. The gap between "hobby project explained on Medium" and "nationwide network of cameras logging your movements" is mostly business model and scale, not secret sauce. Once you understand that, the argument that ALPR networks are just a neutral tool for solving crimes starts to look thinner — the real product is the data pipeline and the retention policy, and those are policy choices, not technical necessities.

Credit to Bhattacharya for the technical breakdown. If you want to see where this same underlying tech has already been deployed as fixed infrastructure near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just read about it, our take-action page has next steps for pushing back at the local level.