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 Add a camera Driving mode SparrowMap4Biz

Set up a camera before and it is asking you to start again? Nothing was deleted — your phone just lost the key. Sign back in →

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

Already have cameras outside? (shops, workshops)

If a camera already watches the street outside your business, it can feed the map without you buying anything or changing how it works. The video never leaves your network — only a crop of a vehicle, shrunk below the size a number plate can be read at.

Start here: Set up your camera — type your address, drop the pin, point the cone at the road. It gives you the camera id the app asks for.
Then run it: SparrowMap4Biz for Windows (76 MB), or relay.py on any machine with pip install opencv-python onnxruntime numpy
Works with RTSP / ONVIF cameras — Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink, Axis, UniFi and most others
No graphics card needed: the vehicle spotting is light, and deciding “patrol car or not” happens on our hardware, not yours

Want an always-on camera?

The other route, and the heavier one: a spare PC with a webcam running the full detector locally. It tells a patrol car from an ordinary one on the machine and reads plates, so nothing waits on us. One command sets it up and starts contributing to the map: