Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

Honeypot & Data-Collection Concerns

• Many view “Have I been Flocked?” as indistinguishable from a honeypot: users voluntarily submit a plate plus IP and browser metadata driven by surveillance anxiety.
• Others downplay the risk, arguing plates are trivially collected in the real world and this site adds little beyond an IP–plate linkage.
• A few suggest obfuscation strategies (e.g., submit many random plates including your own).

Are License Plates PII? What Can Be Done With Them?

• Debate over whether a plate “alone” is useful: some say it’s weak without more data; others note it’s easily joined with leaks (e.g., parking apps), commercial tools (LexisNexis-type), or public records in some states.
• There’s disagreement on whether registration data is legally public; some states used to allow broad lookups but have tightened under federal law, while others still expose some details for “business purposes.”
• Several describe OSINT flows: from plate → real-world home/work locations → identity → behavioral profiling (religious venues, strip clubs, restaurants, etc.).

Flock, Government, and Privatized Surveillance

• Flock is framed as a privatized ALPR network used by police and other agencies, often as an end-run around legal limits on direct government collection.
• Some argue that data collected “for” public agencies should be treated as public records and FOIA-able; others note agencies and vendors often resist disclosure via “trade secret” or statutory carve-outs.
• There’s mention of case law in at least one jurisdiction treating Flock ALPR images as public records; elsewhere, state statutes define ALPR data (including search terms) as confidential.

Mass Tracking, Abuse, and Civil Liberties

• Core worry: aggregation and retention of location data transforms “public” sightings into a powerful dossier (“mosaic theory” / Carpenter-style arguments).
• Examples raised: stalking by cops or abusers, blackmail, targeted robberies, and broad “threat scoring” or dissident-flagging.
• Some defend ALPR as useful for stolen vehicles / missing persons and especially child abductions; others push back that “think of the children” is routinely used to justify erosion of rights, and most abductions are domestic.

Dystopia, Scale, and Comparisons

• Many describe Flock/Ring/ALPR networks as “Orwellian,” especially as they add AI pattern analysis, microphones, and integration with consumer cameras.
• Others argue phones and adtech already provide far richer tracking; some say both adtech and ALPR should be opposed.
• Non-US commenters note ALPR has existed “for decades” elsewhere, but what’s new is cheap, dense, networked coverage and law-enforcement-centric design.

Countermeasures & Alternatives

• Proposed (and often illegal or risky) tactics: obscuring plates, strobes to blind cameras, registering vehicles via trusts/LLCs/out-of-state schemes.
• Some float technical ideas like periodically changing digital plates, but others note that plates exist precisely to be a stable identifier.

Site-Specific Notes

• The site quickly hit Cloudflare Workers’ free-tier limits and became intermittently unavailable, which itself became a mini-thread about “getting Hacker-News’d.”
• Dataset is acknowledged as incomplete: it reflects plates searched in Flock, not all plates seen, and many agencies don’t publish or fully comply with audit-log requests.