SparrowMap – Cameras that watch government vehicles

# SparrowMap Source: [https://sparrowmap.com/](https://sparrowmap.com/) SPARROWMAPThe 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\. [Open the live map](https://map.sparrowmap.com/)[Add a camera](https://map.sparrowmap.com/app)[Driving mode](https://map.sparrowmap.com/drive) 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 \| iex`in PowerShell, or download[SparrowMapCameraSetup\.exe](https://github.com/SparrowMap/sparrowmap/releases) - **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](https://github.com/SparrowMap/sparrowmap/blob/main/docs/DESKTOP_NODE.md)