SPARROWMAP
Running. Not open yet.
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.
What it has actually done, as of 10 August 2026
Vehicles have driven pastTwo cameras, one street, real traffic. That is 2,811 recorded sightings, because one car crossing the view is often caught more than once.
Government vehicles confirmed by a personA human looked at the photo and agreed. These are the only ones treated as a record.
Private number plates storedOut of 2,757 vehicles that were not government. The plate is destroyed on the camera itself, so there is nothing to store, nothing to leak and nothing to hand over.
Government vehicles
The photo and the plate are kept, and they become the public record. Public money, public roads, public vehicles.
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