SparrowMap: Cameras That Watch Government Vehicles
SparrowMap – Cameras that watch government vehicles
SparrowMap is a crowdsourced surveillance network that flips the lens on government vehicles. Volunteers point an old phone or webcam at a street; the software detects vehicles, keeps only those belonging to government entities, and destroys all other images on the device before anything is uploaded. The result is a public map showing the movements of government vehicles, with no video feed to intercept and no accounts required. The project emphasizes privacy: only anonymous dots are sent to the server, and camera locations are never published.
The detection runs on the phone, not on a server. That matters more than it sounds: if the video were uploaded for a server to look at, there would be a video feed to intercept. There is not one.