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Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (news.ycombinator.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 9 months ago* (6 children)

A question to nobody in particular: would it be possible to make license plate covers that are made out of the same material as those anti-facial recognition glasses?

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  • [–] 10 points 9 months ago

    It's not just license plate readers anymore. They have cameras that perform facial recognition and other identifying recognition.

    Your car is in many ways uniquely identifiable by its markings and its model that vehicle with many pictures of it and that license plate are already in a database. If you have stickers, if you have big dents or additions and changes from the base model of your vehicle than you are quite identifiable within a particular geographical area depending on the urban density.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    There’s YouTube video out there, the name escapes at the moment, where he figures out how to basically insert “noise” over his license plate that can lead to flock cameras not recognizing it. Fascinating stuff.

    Two big issues IMO. 1) maybe it fools cameras now, but who knows if it continues to. 2) it’s illegal to cover your plate, probably doubly with the intent to obfuscate. My solution is bike rack. “Oops, didn’t meant to cover my plate” is good plausible deniability.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

    It’s Benn Jordan

    Also, the way they catalogue info is not just license numbers, but any unique combinations of bike racks, bumper stickers or the like. So your bike rack would make you very trackable in a way, but at least your identity would be harder to pinpoint

    And about the intentional obfuscation, all kinds of princess pavement trucks and entitled BMWs deliberately use smoked license plate covers, and nobody bats an eye. So if there’s a law against that, it either has no teeth or is not enforced

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    That guy is just the coolest person ever. Every time I hear his name its some new fucking based shit. His music as The Flashbulb is my favorite music of all time. He has unbelievable range and creativity as an artist and was one of the first people to fight against music labels going after torrenters/downloaders. He uploaded all his own torrents to a private tracker. Just an awesome fucking person who obviously just wants the best for everyone.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Ya, he mentioned the “identifiable” thing in the video. I’m not really how much truth is in that. Even if true, I feel better about being logged as “unidentifiable [color] [make] [model] with bike rack,” over [license plate number] which can be used to look up my name and address.

    Even if his license plate trick worked under his conditions, there’s no way of knowing if it’s tricking Flock cameras or if it is, if it confines to do so with updates. And you never know if it fails, you’ll continue to think it’s working while it’s not.

    Neither way is perfect, so perhaps the better solution it to assume your vehicle is always tracked and to take alternate forms of transportation when engaging in something you don’t want logged.

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