SparrowMap – Cameras that watch government vehicles
SPARROWMAP
The map is live.
Watching the watchers
Cameras that watch
government vehicles.
Owned by nobody.
Volunteers point a spare phone at a street. It reads the vehicles that go past, keeps the government ones, and destroys everything else on the device, before anything is sent anywhere.
Kept
Government vehicles
The photo and the plate are kept, and they become the public record. Public money, public roads, public vehicles.
Destroyed
Everybody else
The plate is destroyed on the camera itself, before anything leaves it. What reaches the server is an anonymous dot with no photo and no plate.
Running a camera
There is nothing to install and no account to make. It runs in a browser tab on a phone you have already stopped using, propped in a window.
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.
- Works on an old phone, a laptop webcam, or a USB camera
- No account, no sign up, no app store
- Your camera's exact location is never published, only the street it watches
- You can shut it off and take your camera out of the network at any time
Want an always-on camera?
A spare PC with a webcam can run the full detector locally — it tells a patrol car from an ordinary one on the machine, and reads plates. One command sets it up and starts contributing to the map:
- Windows: run
irm https://sparrowmap.com/install-node-windows.ps1 | iexin PowerShell, or download SparrowMapCameraSetup.exe - Linux (help us test):
curl -fsSL https://sparrowmap.com/install-node-linux.sh | bash - Everything still runs on your machine — only detections leave it, never video
- Full guide: Running a desktop camera