Hello! Wanted to start a thread to serve as the community consultation for the Organized Editing activity that Drivers Against Flock will be doing.
Just getting started on what submitting edits to OSM would be like. But the goal is to start with platform submissions once enough users report the same ALPR location, or a staff member is able to verify/validate the submission, it will be sent to OSM as changes made by our platform account. This allows our users to anonymously make submissions.
In the future, goal would be to allow users to oAuth into their own OSM account, to make their submissions from their own account.
Flock Safety, a dodgy surveillance-tech company that US police chiefs have been wetting themselves about lately. There’s been quite a lot of pushback, see https://deflock.me/
The app is not affiliated with Flock Safety, we’ve been building a crowdsourced map since Oct 2024, but recently discovered OSM had many already logged. So now we’re working to allow our users to make reports that end up back on OSM to help other projects as well.
At the moment we only work on Flock Safety ALPR cameras.
First, thanks for posting about this and bringing it to the community! One concern I’ve seen in the past with similar “platform account” posts is that there’s not a human ultimately responsible for the edits. A staff member review like you mentioned seems like it would be good here.
A question for you to clarify your plan and also a thought:
Will there be a known, human point of contact for your platform account? That could mitigate some concerns the community would have.
Second, a risk to your submissions would be if bad data makes it through from an automated “enough users” based approval. Recognizing that you’d be submitting to OSM to be community-oriented and improve data availability, automated approvals may create problems. I tend to feel like organized edits get a bit more scrutiny and if enough users report edits, you may end up with a temporary block on your account, so just a heads up there. You might consider mitigations like having multiple accounts (all with known human contacts) for different regions so that if someone sneaks a bunch of bad data through in one state, it doesn’t shut down all of your submissions - not sure what the community would think about that. In the past, people have typically expressed a clear preference for your oAuth approach, but I like that people could submit to you anonymously and after confirmation, you’d add it as your organization.
Asking here because I don’t see any way to do so on your website, what do the colors on your map mean?
More related to your post: Will it be an automated edit after human approval in your system, or a human edit in OSM? Notably, we wouldn’t want to introduce duplicates where OSM already has data.
And more tangential again: why only ALPRs? DeFlock similarly only tracks Flock ALPRs. At MapRVA, we’ve made an effort to also map Flock’s gunshot detectors in OSM: Surveillance Devices | MapRVA
edit: and another question, have you considered mapping the direction the ALPR is pointing?
Will there be a known, human point of contact for your platform account? That could mitigate some concerns the community would have.
Yes, we currently have a dedicated osm@driversagainstflock.com email setup, and will be listing a direct contact for reviewing members once the team is established.
Second, a risk to your submissions would be if bad data makes it through from an automated “enough users” based approval. Recognizing that you’d be submitting to OSM to be community-oriented and improve data availability, automated approvals may create problems. I tend to feel like organized edits get a bit more scrutiny and if enough users report edits, you may end up with a temporary block on your account, so just a heads-up there. You might consider mitigations like having multiple accounts (all with known human contacts) for different regions so that if someone sneaks a bunch of bad data through in one state, it doesn’t shut down all of your submissions - not sure what the community would think about that. In the past, people have typically expressed a clear preference for your oAuth approach, but I like that people could submit to you anonymously and after confirmation, you’d add it as your organization.
Indeed, because we’re going to offer “Login with OSM” via oAuth, I believe most people will be making their submissions via their own OSM accounts. But due to the sensitive context, I could see users not wanting a public information repository such as OSM to be connected to their reports.
A little more context on the user-based approach. Currently, we allow any user viewing a POI to “confirm” it, originally this was meant to be used as a decay when we were sourcing our own data. But now that we’re using OSM, it seems like a good method to allow user “confirmations” of a given POI. I could see a future where we leverage these confirmations, compared to time since the POI was reported, to determine if we should report. But I understand the pushback.
As we grow, I think the regional approach would be perfect. It allows for local validating, and a bit more local point of contact.
Asking here because I don’t see any way to do so on your website, what do the colors on your map mean?
I should add some kind of legend. The colors are the local municipality based on the GPS location.
Helps for grouping them by what community they’re in.
More related to your post: Will it be an automated edit after human approval in your system, or a human edit in OSM? Notably, we wouldn’t want to introduce duplicates where OSM already has data.
It would be an automated edit via the API once approved in our system. As far as duplicates, we plan to prevent submissions “too close” to another POI, and then a slightly larger range where it will require human approval.
And more tangential again: why only ALPRs? DeFlock similarly only tracks Flock ALPRs. At MapRVA, we’ve made an effort to also map Flock’s gunshot detectors in OSM: Surveillance Devices | MapRVA
The short-to-medium term goal is to track all of their devices. I started with their ALPR generically because we’re displaying the Flock Falcon as an avatar on each one. I didn’t want to imply other devices were also Falcon devices in the interim. Although gunshot detectors might not be part of the goal for a driver, oriented mapping solution. Since a big part of our value is the ability to get mapped directions to avoid known POIs.
edit: and another question, have you considered mapping the direction the ALPR is pointing?
Technically it is part of the codebase, but I’m in the middle of changing from a pre-processed solution (from when we used our own data) to one that renders based on the OSM orientation data dynamically.
Technically it is part of the codebase, but I’m in the middle of changing from a pre-processed solution (from when we used our own data) to one that renders based on the OSM orientation data dynamically.
for our map I used“icon-rotate”: [“to-number”, [“get”, “direction”]] (sorry about the “smart” quotes, I can’t figure out how to make discourse not use those) and this sprite:
At the very least you’d have to keep track of which of your registered
users has added what, so that if there turns out to be a copyright or
other legal issue with one user’s contributions, those can be identified
and removed. If you cannot do that then there is a danger of all edits
made with your account having to be removed from OSM because some
violate some copyright…
Indeed, I will be keeping track of them on my own database, and the relationship to the OSM Node, so I could reverse track the submissions if needed by OSM.
Offering “anonymous” edits is very risky, as one of the basic principles in OSM is, that we as a community want to be able to contact the guy who did a specific change. Doing edits with a platform account will most certainly lead to problems. As well for the image of your platform.
Keep in mind, that your platform will be judged mainly by the worst-case-users. Just based on the experience from the past and something you want to keep in mind that that account might get blocked at some time and the community will think " Oh, again Flock messed up our database"
I think another issue would be if we became known as “Flock” as you used it, ha.
But it wouldn’t be anonymous to OSM, we’ll have individual regional validators manually approving, before we submit any. So realistically it’s our staffs’ edits.
I welcome new users every day, and most days I see one or two new users in Washington State adding Flock devices. Right now there are 26,772 devices tagged in the US. Pretty amazing.
I would strongly discourage the mass import of these devices. Too great a chance for errors.
Just curious: How can one tell that a device that appears to be a ALPR is actually being run by Flock versus some other company or operator? The devices I have noticed are devoid of obvious branding or other identification.
So far Flock makes just a couple devices that have a distinct look to them so they’re pretty easy to identify and map. They have a black solar panel about 50cm square with at least one battery pack attached to the back. Then underneath is a small round, black camera “pod”. There seems to be a newer model that is slightly smaller. You can see them on the Flock website.
As far as I know they are all owned by Flock and leased to the jurisdiction that contracts with Flock. The jurisdiction will pay a fee for the initial rollout of the hardware and then a recurring fee for access to the data generated by the company using a web-based tool.
