Last time I looked at this company they just dumped your uploads into an unauthenticated gcp bucket. They just ran your photo thru an llm and asked for its location at the time, and the founder was doing something very weird (in my opinion) with scraping Tinder profiles.
Back when GeoSpy was available for everyone to use, I did a test where I just uploaded an image that had a black background and white text saying the location of a place and a textual description.
GeoSpy told me that it was the place mentioned in the picture, with the textual description as evidence.
You upload photos to tinder, and tinder has rough data on location provided (distance to you) i believe, the photos were the photos people posted on their tinder profile.
Sure, an impressive bit of tech, but the potential for misuse is immense.
To mock their user reviews...
> “Graylark helped me find the person I'm stalking in under 20 minutes. This tool is unbelievable — a true game-changer for those with restraining orders like me who just want to get back at them for that court order."
Do you think criminalizing an activity will stop criminals from highly lucrative criminal activity without going to North Korea levels of societal control?
This mentality is kind of dumb, no offense. We have a bunch of laws. You could just as easily use your argument to say murder should be legal, or rape, and certainly people have.
Laws do, actually, work, for the most part. No they're not perfect, but they don't need to be.
Legalizing capital crimes would barely make them increase in prevalence. The state punishes people for those things mostly so that other people don't.
Laws are basically codified morals, but shitty because they need to be written to be some semblance of objectivity. You typically get stupid results when you try and surgically codify niche things or try and legislate controversial things.
I'd much rather live in a world with LLM image location stalking than one where people just punt everything to the state.
I'm not disagreeing, but that article reeks of "we counted all the petty BS we don't even try to solve to make the numbers look bad to justify asking for more resources"
no, it's not, those things are illegal but cars and trains are not illegal even though you can use them to run over people. Knives, same thing. Alcohol is not illegal even though you can use them to get people too drunk to resist you.
Criminalizing everything that could be used to do bad things is an extreme position. Instead of jumping right to "ban it" you should probably first have a discussion where you consider whether (A) that ban will make any difference to its availability to most people who are criminally-minded anyway and (B) whether it has positive benefits to the law-abiding.
I don't think there's a legitimate purpose for this. I do think no legislature is capable of outlawing this in a way that's both enforceable with some degree of impartiality (i.e. does not provide plausible deniability for a prosecutor to drag a legitimate service through a courtroom for political reasons) and incurs acceptable collateral damages (e.g. doesn't outlaw unrelated stuff that's fine).
>1. They’re not talking about any lucrative activity — the primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.
There's potential for far more, and far more lucrative corporate and state harassment here. Think like low effort red light camera mail ticket but for the general case.
"We see that someone has posted a picture of X at your location. Here is a copy. This is a violation of a) your leas b) the zoning code, please pay us $1000, if you would like to appeal please fill out the attached form and include the $500 appeal fee and if you lose the fine will be $2000. Reminder: you agreed to this in subsection ABC of <your lease|the zoning code>"
I'm not diminishing the ethics debate, but it's crazy to me how easy it was for two non-technical rich dudes in a garage to build Clearview AI (And before vibe-coding!):
1. scrape billions of faces from the internet
2. `git clone` any off the shelf facial-recognition repo
Am I the only one that finds it amusing that conpanies like Google and Facebook sent Clearview legal letters complaining about scraping data from their sites?
Unless someone posts a photo of the stolen car with the numberplate still on, how would you identify YOUR car that way? Its not like cars are unique pieces. Same for bikes or anything else...
You don't have to precisely identify it, you only need to narrow it down to a high likelihood of being your vehicle. Then you can verify the VIN in person.
It wouldn't be hard to narrow things down:
Year/make/model/trim/color/region/timeliness will narrow down to a very small if not already unique subset of vehicles. And on top of that vehicles may often have unique stickers, accessories, or scratches which can further strengthen the case. Flock e.g. uses this data in their vehicle identification algo.
I may have misunderstood, admittedly I just scanned it, but if you or law enforcement have to scan the universe of apps/internet to find a picture before this is useful… it’s not useful. Your starting point is a needle in a haystack.
I thought you uploaded a picture you already had, it does the scanning, and a hit might look like “some rando posted a selfie at Zilker Park 20 minutes ago on insta and that car was in the background”.
Again, the example in the article is to find the vehicle being resold online. There are only a few popular websites where people sell vehicles secondhand in any particular area, and you can easily filter to the characteristics of the car you are looking for. To search all of them is a 15 minute exercise.
Although your example may be quite viable in a repossession scenario where the possessor is known but the location is not.
Right, see that is the example they went in depth on. I thought it was helping identify the chopshops and hideouts more directly as they indicated in the bullets.
This part still is the sticking point;
> When browsing Craigslist, I came across a regular car listing that showed a vehicle with buildings visible in the background. The listing claimed the vehicle was located in San Francisco. ...... Superbolt returned precise latitude and longitude coordinates that, when entered into Google Maps, revealed an exact match to the buildings visible in the listing photos.
How often do people find their stolen vehicles posted on CL/marketplace? Do police have resources to constantly browse hoping they see a similar picture of their stolen vehicles? How do they match it to the one they are looking for? Eg. if this was a cop, they may think, this vehicle matches the description of the stolen car. And this AI tells me the picture was taken at these exact coordinates (not super useful as this looks like a public place and I'm sure not where the vehicle is being stored). They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN or otherwise confirm it is the correct stolen vehicle they are looking for, then they get an arrest and recovery.
But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description. They now have to arrange to visit them all until they find the match or exhaust their options. How is this AI adding any value given with & without it the process looks the same; find listing, ask "seller" to meet, meet, evaluate. You don't need this AI to ask the "seller" to meet up and pretend to be an interested buyer.
FWIW, this looks like it could be a white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader (granted, the hatchback is a further narrowing feature, but that's not super common either). No police department I've ever heard of has the resources to check on all these listings. If the thief stole it in SF but listed it for sale in Seattle or LA or anywhere else, how would anyone know? That's the haystack part, it's a big haystack.
Police probably do not care much unless you are in a small town. Insurance has a financial incentive to care.
> They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN
You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
> But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description.
There might be a few vehicles in an area matching make/model/year. But it is trivial when looking at a photo to filter on further criteria... and once you look at the photo you can observe trim, exterior color, interior color, stickers, inspection sticker, etc, you will have a very high degree of certainty even on a common model.
> white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader
Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Within a whole 500 mi of the bay area there are only 5 white VW Jetta Wagons listed. All you need to know is what year it is, to narrow it down to 2 or 3. If you know the trim, approximate mileage, any visually distinctive feature, etc, you are guaranteed a match. Even if it wasn't a wagon, it is not hard to filter down to a unique vehicle.
> You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
You're assuming the vehicle remains where the photo was taken.
> Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Those were the only attributes that were apparent in the photo. I said I ignored Wagon because that was a cherry picked unique filter. If it wasn't a wagon, your analysis is the same as mine, >100 vehicles in the SF bay area (I only filtered on 100 mile radius). But again, why steal a vehicle and post it for sale in the same city you stole it from? Criminals already move stolen vehicles, this is all but obvious.
Basically, this helps you catch the dumbest of the dumb criminals. Someone that steals a very unique car and posts it for sale in the same area they stole it from and also leaves the car parked in the same place they took the photo. There's also a time element, if they hide the vehicle for a few weeks, then post it for sale it's more likely the initial active investigation has faded and the cops aren't actively hitting refresh on marketplace.
Glad you believe this is useful, I'll continue to disagree - it might have some value but it's usefulness is being exaggerated in the article.
Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle? Are they trying to sell it whole? I can't imagine that is very common, since the buyer won't be able to register it, right? Aren't most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
> Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle?
Casual small time occassional car thieves might do this, receivers of stolen cars as payment for other debts owed by a thief may do this ... but it's somewhat atypical.
> Aren't most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
In the organised bigger scale operations vehicles are dealt with for the greatest profit with least risk. A good many are stripped for the parts - the more popular the car, the larger the parts after market.
A suprising number of cars from developed countries are shunted whole into containers and sold elsewhere about the globe. eg:-
“Each year, hundreds of thousands of vehicles are stolen around the world, yet the initial theft is often only the beginning of a vehicle’s journey into the global criminal underworld.
“Stolen vehicles are trafficked across the globe, traded for drugs and other illicit commodities, enriching organized crime groups and even terrorists.
Going back to the the article, you have to find a picture of your exact car online somewhere, then use GeoSpy to tell you it was stolen in the US and was photographed in Columbia, then you go to that place in Columbia to find it's not parked there anymore, so you contact the person who made the post/listing and try to arrange a meeting, then you confirm it's your vehicle, then... what exactly?
They will often sell it to someone for super cheap. They don't care about getting fair market value. $1000 for a $10000 van with no title isn't a loss to a thief. It's still $1000. And there are a lot of desperate people who are willing to pay $1000 for any type of transportation, and are willing to drive around until they get caught. They'll just steal some plates and run them with valid tabs. Maybe pass it onto someone else for $1000 later on down the road, and get another from their favorite stolen car supplier.
Really? Not that anyone has any data on any of this but since you're measuring it as "often" I'm going to disagree and say this is a very tiny percentage of stolen vehicles that are being used this way.
If they are, it's probably being bought from a hookup you know and not randomly on marketplace.
Did I completely miss the technical aspect of this blog? They list an improvement but no details on how they achieved it. It sounds like a trained embedding model and a vector search. All told though this just reads as boring product talk.
The picture in the article shows what looks like keypoint matching (ie, SIFT, SURF, FAST) between the query picture and the database. This can give an exact location if a picture of the location exists in their database.
They contrasted this with their prior technique which is more of an image classifier that can identify general location from image features. This approach does not require their database to contain a picture of the exact location.
First things first, its entirely possible to geolocate using just visual markers.
A bunch of startups did it around 2018 (most got bought by facebook, ie mapillary) They work by extracting keypoints from pictures and building a massive point cloud of identifiable key points.
But
That picture they use with supposed keypoint matching is wrong. None of those keypoints are reliable feature descriptors. They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to impossible.
Now, they might have a vibe based matcher which does some basic spatial comparison, but I'm not sure how reliable they are, especially given a large search radius.
The other interesting question is, where did they get their data from? I'm pretty sure google spent a lot of time making it really difficult to train from street view (lord knows we've tried.)
Edit the demo here: https://geospy.ai/ is much more what I recognise a bog standard VPS system does. Note that the user is matching buildings. Thats far more reliable way to do feature matching.
>They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to impossible.
Seems plausible enough to me. The trees are evergreens in a place that doesn't get snow, and the keypoints are mostly grounded on stable parts of the trees (trunks or thick branches), which barring gale-force winds probably don't fluctuate all that much.
The part that gives me pause are the keypoints that map the hood of the car to the pavement, and the point on the far right that maps the ledge to the pavement. How can a system robust enough to map foliage also return such blatant false matches?
short answer is that they are similar enough features to match. think of them as homophones (ie words that sound the same but have different meanings) in language. You need context to be able to filter them out. (https://github.com/polygon-software/python-visual-odometry/b...)
> don't fluctuate all that much.
Over time that doesn't bear out. Good features are areas of high contrast with nice clearly defined edges (text is great, so are buildings). branches move, which means they create lots of diffrent features depending on the wind, even light wind. when we were building out maps, we filtered as much greenery out as possible
our goal was to build technology to safeguard American freedom and prosperity...
...America deserves more. While Silicon Valley hype centers around LLMs, AGI, and SSI, our focus remains on visual intelligence—understanding the world we see with our eyes, what we call Visual Super Intelligence
It's kinda shocking to me how people are so willing to give tools to government agencies to track, spy, find, dox, and identify fellow citizens.
I guess I grew up drinking the 'American culture is one of mistrust of government' cool-aide, rather than 'American government has deep pockets' fruit punch.
I'm not sure if it's just an evolution of the times, or an actual erosion of principals (since when? 9/11?)
Started much earlier than 9/11. Probably the drug “war” that had things going towards the police state thing. Police departments buying military grade weapons and equipment to arm their swat teams. Then compounded by the fact US citizens are extremely armed themselves and use automatic rifles in their crime. So the police were outgunned. I think the North Hollywood shootout was pivotal in that regard, in the mid-late 90s.
A lot of people lack the ability to do or credibly threaten sufficient violence for that to be actionable. Serving all the details up to the cops, who have nearly infinite ability to threaten violence, on a silver platter "here's your open and shut auto theft case, now go pad your stats" is the more tractable solution.
that is not that either though or is it? i mean say i found my vehicle on some platform for sale and then located it with their service, now what? i call the cops i suppose, i dont see how this is much different to calling them once they agreed to meet somewhere.
Yes, the term is strykers. Which can refer to the person that does it, or the actual stolen car that has been legitimized.
The stryker will find or buy from somewhere, a pool of unissued VINs that don't flag anything in the state registration system and match various vehicles (Dodge Chargers, Kias, Hyundais). Then when someone comes with that vehicle, they will strike a new Vin plate. Sometimes if they buy the VINs it will come in a package with plates. From there it's possible to get the vehicle registered, most likely under someone else's name that has no idea and they will sell / rent the car with tag etc. Though sometimes they will just make a fake plate too and then steal a real plate, swap it with the fake plate and put the real plate on the stolen car and sell it like that. In some cases / states they can actually get a title reissued.
Boats are even better, but much smaller market, just look up coast guard plates on Amazon.
Usually in the sophisticated thieves, it's the case that they buy a VIN from a car that was exported and not recorded as such. They then get a new copy of the title for a car that is no longer in the country and can request new factory stamped vin parts such as the suspension pillar.
The car looks completely legitimate to your average person with matching VINs it's just there are now two cars in two different places
I happened to see a video yesterday, unsourced though, which said that for cars that fetch a high premium overseas, exporters hire "straw buyers" to buy the cars and register them, then immediately take them to the port to be exported.
So, those seem like they'd be pretty good ones to use, as the straw buyer would certainly not report it as stolen. Though I bet they don't renew the tags, so you might owe a couple years of back registration depending on how old the 'source' car is.
Plenty of brands sell vehicles for less in some markets than others.
They get all cranky about people arbitraging it but it is blatant price discrimination.
Manufacturers were starting to require proof of insurance before handing over the keys and then people would get it and cancel+refund the insurance. Cat meet mouse.
These aren't high end cars and essentially there is a formula for VINs but not all of them that get issued get used for various reasons so there are excess valid but not circulating VINs out there. It's just like social security and CPNs. Same people are sellers.
Yes and no. In a video I watched on YouTube the people fencing the car had scratched off VINs in the bonnet, door and windscreen, painted and re-etched the exported car's VIN and gone out of their way to find a reasonable fake V5 certificate (UK equivalent of a DMV cert I think) with similar specification as the stolen car (or found the docs first).
The car was sold on, eventually went to Copart with a blown engine and then the YouTuber found out through his videos that the car he owned was stolen and the original had been exported because the interior color was not the same as the decoded VIN. Only when he took the engine out of the car and compared the engine number with the one in BMW's database and the reported VIN in the infotainment was he confident that the car was stolen, same for Copart (who wouldn't entertain the car was stolen).
I think if it wasn't a famous YouTuber who bought the car, it's highly possible that the stolen car would go nu-noticed throughout its lifetime as stolen, even if taken to a main dealer. If I recall correctly the car reports he used (maybe car-vertical) also didn't pick up any discrepancy.
For the criminals its good business, you find a 30k plus car, pay for a clean VIN from cypress or somewhere and then do the damage to the car to re-new it as a different car, even if it costs 10k to do, its a lucrative 20k "profit" and thats on the high end, seems like cars can be stolen overnight, especially ones the criminals specialize in.
Ultimately they are tied to an individual vehicle in its original configuration in every way.
But thieves don't really really care about what it technically represents, they are more interested in what they can get away with. That would be solely dependent on how stringent the inspection is to get a rebuilt title.
Sure, but that's not that hard to find a match of. And if you cover all your bases, you can probably get away with a year or two plus or minus in most cases.
"law enforcement could quickly locate and recover the stolen vehicle"
"law enforcement agencies can achieve faster resolutions, greater efficiency, and better outcomes for vehicle theft cases"
Could and would are two very different things in America.
In most cases, the police would simply do nothing.
Facial recognition technology (see Facebook auto-detecting your friends when uploading a photo) has existed for decades. Why do the police still post photos of suspects asking the public in help identifying so-and-so?* Can't they cross-reference with the DMV database or even Facebook to see if there are any matches?
*Although these days they even stopped doing that, I've seen cases where they blurred out the suspects face and then asked the public in help identifying them. They do this to protect the criminal's identity. Sigh. I wish we could bring back name and shame.
I’d be lying if I said I never ripped photos from listings on a certain popular online auction platform when selling stuff online (before the ubiquity of digital cameras and smartphones)
Articles seem to only go back to around 2024, how about 1.0? What was major enough to finally reach 1.0? Would be great to have a more technical blog post about what kind of major breakthroughs were discovered while developing this since the first discovery of this in 2022.
>The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is urging New York City residents to exercise caution when purchasing cars online, as they have recently identified a surge in the sale of stolen vehicles.
>As of Oct. 15 (2024), the DMV reports that it has recovered 228 stolen vehicles amounting to a value of $6.35 million. Of the 228 vehicles recovered this year, 149 were purchased by an unsuspecting victim after seeing a post on Facebook Marketplace or a similar site.
That is 65% of recovered stolen vehicles in New York was sold through online marked places.
"From 1997 through 2022,
reported thefts decreased 67 percent. In 2022, however, there was a dramatic increase in vehicles
reported stolen: 26,653, representing a 112 percent increase from the 12,573 reported stolen in 2019."
It's very common with bikes, it wouldn't surprise me if they do it with cars too. I found my own stolen bike for sale on Facebook but still wasn't able to recover it. They just use a stolen or anonymized Facebook account so you can't easily figure out who is selling it.
I once saw a story about someone who saw her bike on sale even before it was stolen. The thieves announce the bikes they see regularly in the same place in the street and only steal them if they have a potential buyer.
That way they only take the risk when they need to, they don't need any storage area, and if they are caught it is only for 1 bike, not tens or hundreds.
Tried that but I guess they got suspicious and didn't show up, or sold it to someone else before me.
PSA for anyone with a bike: register it on https://bikeindex.org/. I registered mine there the day it was stolen and almost immediately got emails from several people who were monitoring a known bike thief's Marketplace account and saw mine listed.
Nice idea. Maybe do it for bicycles which are often more unique/personalized. Also, how are they going to identify identical model/trim/color cars when the license plates have been removed or switched?
Sounds more like “vehicle recovery” for the repossession market first and foremost.
A repo investigator for the bank locates the target vehicle via owner’s social media, takes photo of the car, shoots it into GeoSpy, then ganks the car based on given locations in the owner’s photos. Pair it up with ALPR hits across a city from national ALPR networks (to help correlate home/business/work patterns) and… wellp, there you go!
Nothing like an OSINT company like Bellingcat hasn't done before, it's just that in those cases it was done on citizens belonging to adversary countries. It was just a matter of time, I guess.
See how Bellingcat was "reverse" finding the identities of Russian citizens based on the cars they were owning. Too lazy to search for the exact links, this was around 2020-2021, something like that.
Later edit: Something like this [1], from late 2020: "Russian Vehicle Registration Leak Reveals Additional GRU Hackers". There were also some other articles with Google StreetView screenshots and the like, I won't search for them because even finding this one reference means I'm not doing something better with my time right now.
Last time I looked at this company they just dumped your uploads into an unauthenticated gcp bucket. They just ran your photo thru an llm and asked for its location at the time, and the founder was doing something very weird (in my opinion) with scraping Tinder profiles.
https://x.com/i/status/1786030866214326651
Back when GeoSpy was available for everyone to use, I did a test where I just uploaded an image that had a black background and white text saying the location of a place and a textual description.
GeoSpy told me that it was the place mentioned in the picture, with the textual description as evidence.
Yes, I have done the same and also used it to prompt inject to give some info about the prompt, but I don’t have that data anymore.
What were the jpgs in tge thotDBSmash folder? Did the founder use that bucket to collect photos of women? Or was that geolocation material, too…
> Or was that geolocation material, too…
Yeah I think we've figured out what inspired him to build the tool. :/
if creep and tech nerd was a person:
You upload photos to tinder, and tinder has rough data on location provided (distance to you) i believe, the photos were the photos people posted on their tinder profile.
Wow — that is probably the most suspicious set of three details ever shared on this forum. Thank you for enlightening us!
Sure, an impressive bit of tech, but the potential for misuse is immense.
To mock their user reviews...
> “Graylark helped me find the person I'm stalking in under 20 minutes. This tool is unbelievable — a true game-changer for those with restraining orders like me who just want to get back at them for that court order."
It will never not be misused. These types of apps should be illegal
Do you think criminalizing an activity will stop criminals from highly lucrative criminal activity without going to North Korea levels of societal control?
Yes. Blackmailing exists since the dawn of humanity (probably). It doesn't mean that we should make it easier.
I mean, yes, generally, for most things.
This mentality is kind of dumb, no offense. We have a bunch of laws. You could just as easily use your argument to say murder should be legal, or rape, and certainly people have.
Laws do, actually, work, for the most part. No they're not perfect, but they don't need to be.
Legalizing capital crimes would barely make them increase in prevalence. The state punishes people for those things mostly so that other people don't.
Laws are basically codified morals, but shitty because they need to be written to be some semblance of objectivity. You typically get stupid results when you try and surgically codify niche things or try and legislate controversial things.
I'd much rather live in a world with LLM image location stalking than one where people just punt everything to the state.
> Laws do, actually, work, for the most part.
"No-one charged in 9 out of 10 crimes" https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44884113
I'm not disagreeing, but that article reeks of "we counted all the petty BS we don't even try to solve to make the numbers look bad to justify asking for more resources"
no, it's not, those things are illegal but cars and trains are not illegal even though you can use them to run over people. Knives, same thing. Alcohol is not illegal even though you can use them to get people too drunk to resist you.
Criminalizing everything that could be used to do bad things is an extreme position. Instead of jumping right to "ban it" you should probably first have a discussion where you consider whether (A) that ban will make any difference to its availability to most people who are criminally-minded anyway and (B) whether it has positive benefits to the law-abiding.
And what legitimate purpose are we balancing against the negative purposes in this circumstance?
I don't think there's a legitimate purpose for this. I do think no legislature is capable of outlawing this in a way that's both enforceable with some degree of impartiality (i.e. does not provide plausible deniability for a prosecutor to drag a legitimate service through a courtroom for political reasons) and incurs acceptable collateral damages (e.g. doesn't outlaw unrelated stuff that's fine).
On most sane societies guns are illegal, drugs are illegal and blackmailing is illegal
1. They’re not talking about any lucrative activity — the primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.
2. Why outlaw bombs if criminals have obtained them anyway? You’re just arguing against he concept of laws at this point.
3. A type of app is not synonymous with “an activity”
>1. They’re not talking about any lucrative activity — the primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.
There's potential for far more, and far more lucrative corporate and state harassment here. Think like low effort red light camera mail ticket but for the general case.
"We see that someone has posted a picture of X at your location. Here is a copy. This is a violation of a) your leas b) the zoning code, please pay us $1000, if you would like to appeal please fill out the attached form and include the $500 appeal fee and if you lose the fine will be $2000. Reminder: you agreed to this in subsection ABC of <your lease|the zoning code>"
... therefore what, exactly?
> the potential for misuse is immense.
Who do you think is "sponsoring" this ? /s
Reminds me of the Clearview AI controversy[0].
I'm not diminishing the ethics debate, but it's crazy to me how easy it was for two non-technical rich dudes in a garage to build Clearview AI (And before vibe-coding!):
It was just a matter of when.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI#History
Concerned but given the use can it be stopped ?
Yes. If one knows that someone has their identifiable data without consent it is a problem.
While they are pictures on the internet it is one thing, when you gather them all and put a label with a number then it is problematic.
Remember that FaceApp to make you older, younger etc? Imagine how much data those guys collected?
I know someone who submitted the face of a member of my family without consent. You could not even complain without agreeing with the TOS first
Am I the only one that finds it amusing that conpanies like Google and Facebook sent Clearview legal letters complaining about scraping data from their sites?
Unless someone posts a photo of the stolen car with the numberplate still on, how would you identify YOUR car that way? Its not like cars are unique pieces. Same for bikes or anything else...
You don't have to precisely identify it, you only need to narrow it down to a high likelihood of being your vehicle. Then you can verify the VIN in person.
It wouldn't be hard to narrow things down:
Year/make/model/trim/color/region/timeliness will narrow down to a very small if not already unique subset of vehicles. And on top of that vehicles may often have unique stickers, accessories, or scratches which can further strengthen the case. Flock e.g. uses this data in their vehicle identification algo.
I have no photos of my vehicles to initiate a search this way. Am I an outlier and it’s normal for people to keep vehicle pictures handy?
If you had photos of your vehicle, presumably you'd know where you took it.
The idea here is that you find a picture of your vehicle that the thief took, and use this to find the location of where the thief has your vehicle.
That seems like a pretty rare situation compared to any number of alternative use cases. Most of which are decidedly less wholesome.
It is literally the “real world example” from the article.
I may have misunderstood, admittedly I just scanned it, but if you or law enforcement have to scan the universe of apps/internet to find a picture before this is useful… it’s not useful. Your starting point is a needle in a haystack.
I thought you uploaded a picture you already had, it does the scanning, and a hit might look like “some rando posted a selfie at Zilker Park 20 minutes ago on insta and that car was in the background”.
Again, the example in the article is to find the vehicle being resold online. There are only a few popular websites where people sell vehicles secondhand in any particular area, and you can easily filter to the characteristics of the car you are looking for. To search all of them is a 15 minute exercise.
Although your example may be quite viable in a repossession scenario where the possessor is known but the location is not.
Right, see that is the example they went in depth on. I thought it was helping identify the chopshops and hideouts more directly as they indicated in the bullets.
This part still is the sticking point;
> When browsing Craigslist, I came across a regular car listing that showed a vehicle with buildings visible in the background. The listing claimed the vehicle was located in San Francisco. ...... Superbolt returned precise latitude and longitude coordinates that, when entered into Google Maps, revealed an exact match to the buildings visible in the listing photos.
How often do people find their stolen vehicles posted on CL/marketplace? Do police have resources to constantly browse hoping they see a similar picture of their stolen vehicles? How do they match it to the one they are looking for? Eg. if this was a cop, they may think, this vehicle matches the description of the stolen car. And this AI tells me the picture was taken at these exact coordinates (not super useful as this looks like a public place and I'm sure not where the vehicle is being stored). They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN or otherwise confirm it is the correct stolen vehicle they are looking for, then they get an arrest and recovery.
But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description. They now have to arrange to visit them all until they find the match or exhaust their options. How is this AI adding any value given with & without it the process looks the same; find listing, ask "seller" to meet, meet, evaluate. You don't need this AI to ask the "seller" to meet up and pretend to be an interested buyer.
FWIW, this looks like it could be a white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader (granted, the hatchback is a further narrowing feature, but that's not super common either). No police department I've ever heard of has the resources to check on all these listings. If the thief stole it in SF but listed it for sale in Seattle or LA or anywhere else, how would anyone know? That's the haystack part, it's a big haystack.
Police probably do not care much unless you are in a small town. Insurance has a financial incentive to care.
> They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN
You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
> But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description.
There might be a few vehicles in an area matching make/model/year. But it is trivial when looking at a photo to filter on further criteria... and once you look at the photo you can observe trim, exterior color, interior color, stickers, inspection sticker, etc, you will have a very high degree of certainty even on a common model.
> white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader
Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Within a whole 500 mi of the bay area there are only 5 white VW Jetta Wagons listed. All you need to know is what year it is, to narrow it down to 2 or 3. If you know the trim, approximate mileage, any visually distinctive feature, etc, you are guaranteed a match. Even if it wasn't a wagon, it is not hard to filter down to a unique vehicle.
> You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
You're assuming the vehicle remains where the photo was taken.
> Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Those were the only attributes that were apparent in the photo. I said I ignored Wagon because that was a cherry picked unique filter. If it wasn't a wagon, your analysis is the same as mine, >100 vehicles in the SF bay area (I only filtered on 100 mile radius). But again, why steal a vehicle and post it for sale in the same city you stole it from? Criminals already move stolen vehicles, this is all but obvious.
Basically, this helps you catch the dumbest of the dumb criminals. Someone that steals a very unique car and posts it for sale in the same area they stole it from and also leaves the car parked in the same place they took the photo. There's also a time element, if they hide the vehicle for a few weeks, then post it for sale it's more likely the initial active investigation has faded and the cops aren't actively hitting refresh on marketplace.
Glad you believe this is useful, I'll continue to disagree - it might have some value but it's usefulness is being exaggerated in the article.
Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle? Are they trying to sell it whole? I can't imagine that is very common, since the buyer won't be able to register it, right? Aren't most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
> Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle?
Casual small time occassional car thieves might do this, receivers of stolen cars as payment for other debts owed by a thief may do this ... but it's somewhat atypical.
> Aren't most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
In the organised bigger scale operations vehicles are dealt with for the greatest profit with least risk. A good many are stripped for the parts - the more popular the car, the larger the parts after market.
A suprising number of cars from developed countries are shunted whole into containers and sold elsewhere about the globe. eg:-
https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2025/INTERP...Going back to the the article, you have to find a picture of your exact car online somewhere, then use GeoSpy to tell you it was stolen in the US and was photographed in Columbia, then you go to that place in Columbia to find it's not parked there anymore, so you contact the person who made the post/listing and try to arrange a meeting, then you confirm it's your vehicle, then... what exactly?
Local police are doing none of this btw.
They will often sell it to someone for super cheap. They don't care about getting fair market value. $1000 for a $10000 van with no title isn't a loss to a thief. It's still $1000. And there are a lot of desperate people who are willing to pay $1000 for any type of transportation, and are willing to drive around until they get caught. They'll just steal some plates and run them with valid tabs. Maybe pass it onto someone else for $1000 later on down the road, and get another from their favorite stolen car supplier.
> often
Really? Not that anyone has any data on any of this but since you're measuring it as "often" I'm going to disagree and say this is a very tiny percentage of stolen vehicles that are being used this way.
If they are, it's probably being bought from a hookup you know and not randomly on marketplace.
Sometime the sellers of stolen cars are inconsiderate to the buyers in this way. Or they sell to buyers who also don’t care to register their vehicle.
"law enforcement could quickly locate and recover the stolen vehicle"
geospy.ai: the real technology seems to be that they invented the world's thinnest veil
Clearview seems even worse to me, but yeah this is a good candidate for second place on the list of undesirable businesses
Hah. Good point. Allow me to counter: the name alone.
Clearview could be eye drops. GeoSpy: well...
I think Flock beat them to it
Did I completely miss the technical aspect of this blog? They list an improvement but no details on how they achieved it. It sounds like a trained embedding model and a vector search. All told though this just reads as boring product talk.
The picture in the article shows what looks like keypoint matching (ie, SIFT, SURF, FAST) between the query picture and the database. This can give an exact location if a picture of the location exists in their database.
They contrasted this with their prior technique which is more of an image classifier that can identify general location from image features. This approach does not require their database to contain a picture of the exact location.
I don't think you missed anything, but I don't think it's intended to be a technical blog either.
Further and further into hyper-surveillance hell
Ok so this looks like bullshit.
First things first, its entirely possible to geolocate using just visual markers.
A bunch of startups did it around 2018 (most got bought by facebook, ie mapillary) They work by extracting keypoints from pictures and building a massive point cloud of identifiable key points.
But
That picture they use with supposed keypoint matching is wrong. None of those keypoints are reliable feature descriptors. They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to impossible.
Now, they might have a vibe based matcher which does some basic spatial comparison, but I'm not sure how reliable they are, especially given a large search radius.
The other interesting question is, where did they get their data from? I'm pretty sure google spent a lot of time making it really difficult to train from street view (lord knows we've tried.)
Edit the demo here: https://geospy.ai/ is much more what I recognise a bog standard VPS system does. Note that the user is matching buildings. Thats far more reliable way to do feature matching.
>They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to impossible.
Seems plausible enough to me. The trees are evergreens in a place that doesn't get snow, and the keypoints are mostly grounded on stable parts of the trees (trunks or thick branches), which barring gale-force winds probably don't fluctuate all that much.
The part that gives me pause are the keypoints that map the hood of the car to the pavement, and the point on the far right that maps the ledge to the pavement. How can a system robust enough to map foliage also return such blatant false matches?
> return such blatant false matches
long answer, have a try on this demo: https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.html
short answer is that they are similar enough features to match. think of them as homophones (ie words that sound the same but have different meanings) in language. You need context to be able to filter them out. (https://github.com/polygon-software/python-visual-odometry/b...)
> don't fluctuate all that much.
Over time that doesn't bear out. Good features are areas of high contrast with nice clearly defined edges (text is great, so are buildings). branches move, which means they create lots of diffrent features depending on the wind, even light wind. when we were building out maps, we filtered as much greenery out as possible
More from this company:
Why America’s Heroes Deserve the Most Advanced AI
our goal was to build technology to safeguard American freedom and prosperity...
...America deserves more. While Silicon Valley hype centers around LLMs, AGI, and SSI, our focus remains on visual intelligence—understanding the world we see with our eyes, what we call Visual Super Intelligence
https://geospy.ai/blog/why-america-s-heroes-deserve-the-visu...
'Americas heros' deserve oversight.
Services like this (Flock, etc.) should either be illegal or accessible to everyone.
It's kinda shocking to me how people are so willing to give tools to government agencies to track, spy, find, dox, and identify fellow citizens.
I guess I grew up drinking the 'American culture is one of mistrust of government' cool-aide, rather than 'American government has deep pockets' fruit punch.
I'm not sure if it's just an evolution of the times, or an actual erosion of principals (since when? 9/11?)
Started much earlier than 9/11. Probably the drug “war” that had things going towards the police state thing. Police departments buying military grade weapons and equipment to arm their swat teams. Then compounded by the fact US citizens are extremely armed themselves and use automatic rifles in their crime. So the police were outgunned. I think the North Hollywood shootout was pivotal in that regard, in the mid-late 90s.
Many people are willing to disregard their morals in exchange for a bag of money.
Not even a bag. A discount or free shipping is often enough.
> I grew up drinking the 'American culture ...'
> misspells "Kool-Aid"
you could afford the real stuff??
Oh yeah.
If a thief is selling your stolen car, would that not be very easy to locate by showing interest in buying it? Am I missing something?
A lot of people lack the ability to do or credibly threaten sufficient violence for that to be actionable. Serving all the details up to the cops, who have nearly infinite ability to threaten violence, on a silver platter "here's your open and shut auto theft case, now go pad your stats" is the more tractable solution.
that is not that either though or is it? i mean say i found my vehicle on some platform for sale and then located it with their service, now what? i call the cops i suppose, i dont see how this is much different to calling them once they agreed to meet somewhere.
Wondering how theives can sell a stolen car. Do they have fake paperwork?
Yes, the term is strykers. Which can refer to the person that does it, or the actual stolen car that has been legitimized.
The stryker will find or buy from somewhere, a pool of unissued VINs that don't flag anything in the state registration system and match various vehicles (Dodge Chargers, Kias, Hyundais). Then when someone comes with that vehicle, they will strike a new Vin plate. Sometimes if they buy the VINs it will come in a package with plates. From there it's possible to get the vehicle registered, most likely under someone else's name that has no idea and they will sell / rent the car with tag etc. Though sometimes they will just make a fake plate too and then steal a real plate, swap it with the fake plate and put the real plate on the stolen car and sell it like that. In some cases / states they can actually get a title reissued.
Boats are even better, but much smaller market, just look up coast guard plates on Amazon.
Stiker vs Styker, is regional.
For Reference: Striker Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTxkD5JFpg
Usually in the sophisticated thieves, it's the case that they buy a VIN from a car that was exported and not recorded as such. They then get a new copy of the title for a car that is no longer in the country and can request new factory stamped vin parts such as the suspension pillar. The car looks completely legitimate to your average person with matching VINs it's just there are now two cars in two different places
Exported but not recorded, wouldn’t that be a stolen car? If so the VIN prolly can’t be reused. Or is there a legit way this would happen?
Who else exports their car, doesn’t report it and then offers their VIN?
I happened to see a video yesterday, unsourced though, which said that for cars that fetch a high premium overseas, exporters hire "straw buyers" to buy the cars and register them, then immediately take them to the port to be exported.
So, those seem like they'd be pretty good ones to use, as the straw buyer would certainly not report it as stolen. Though I bet they don't renew the tags, so you might owe a couple years of back registration depending on how old the 'source' car is.
Plenty of brands sell vehicles for less in some markets than others.
They get all cranky about people arbitraging it but it is blatant price discrimination.
Manufacturers were starting to require proof of insurance before handing over the keys and then people would get it and cancel+refund the insurance. Cat meet mouse.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/icbc-luxury-...
These aren't high end cars and essentially there is a formula for VINs but not all of them that get issued get used for various reasons so there are excess valid but not circulating VINs out there. It's just like social security and CPNs. Same people are sellers.
So the only way to know that this has been done is to read the OBD2 VIN or check all the resaleable parts for VINs?
It sounds like this scam would only get discovered when you go to the dealer for service, perhaps.
Yes and no. In a video I watched on YouTube the people fencing the car had scratched off VINs in the bonnet, door and windscreen, painted and re-etched the exported car's VIN and gone out of their way to find a reasonable fake V5 certificate (UK equivalent of a DMV cert I think) with similar specification as the stolen car (or found the docs first).
The car was sold on, eventually went to Copart with a blown engine and then the YouTuber found out through his videos that the car he owned was stolen and the original had been exported because the interior color was not the same as the decoded VIN. Only when he took the engine out of the car and compared the engine number with the one in BMW's database and the reported VIN in the infotainment was he confident that the car was stolen, same for Copart (who wouldn't entertain the car was stolen).
I think if it wasn't a famous YouTuber who bought the car, it's highly possible that the stolen car would go nu-noticed throughout its lifetime as stolen, even if taken to a main dealer. If I recall correctly the car reports he used (maybe car-vertical) also didn't pick up any discrepancy.
For the criminals its good business, you find a 30k plus car, pay for a clean VIN from cypress or somewhere and then do the damage to the car to re-new it as a different car, even if it costs 10k to do, its a lucrative 20k "profit" and thats on the high end, seems like cars can be stolen overnight, especially ones the criminals specialize in.
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI4S2LT_ntE
Just to add to this, the "clean" exported car's VINs were bought off snapchat for ~4k per car. (for high end cars.)
You can buy a totaled car for cheap and use its VIN.
Are VINs not tied to the make, model, and year?
Ultimately they are tied to an individual vehicle in its original configuration in every way.
But thieves don't really really care about what it technically represents, they are more interested in what they can get away with. That would be solely dependent on how stringent the inspection is to get a rebuilt title.
Sure, but that's not that hard to find a match of. And if you cover all your bases, you can probably get away with a year or two plus or minus in most cases.
The easiest way is to sell it at a steep discount to a buyer willing to accept the lack of paperwork for a good deal.
In some cases the car is completely disassembled and the parts are sold.
from what I know they sell it to other criminals which use it to commit further crimes or ship it off the continent
most commonly it is used for drugs in canada since every case I hear about ends up in forensics
Even if this was a real application, it is wrong
"law enforcement could quickly locate and recover the stolen vehicle"
"law enforcement agencies can achieve faster resolutions, greater efficiency, and better outcomes for vehicle theft cases"
Could and would are two very different things in America.
In most cases, the police would simply do nothing.
Facial recognition technology (see Facebook auto-detecting your friends when uploading a photo) has existed for decades. Why do the police still post photos of suspects asking the public in help identifying so-and-so?* Can't they cross-reference with the DMV database or even Facebook to see if there are any matches?
*Although these days they even stopped doing that, I've seen cases where they blurred out the suspects face and then asked the public in help identifying them. They do this to protect the criminal's identity. Sigh. I wish we could bring back name and shame.
> Can't they cross-reference with the DMV database or even Facebook to see if there are any matches?
I think there are laws that bar them from doing that.
But who takes the photo of the stolen car?
The thief, when selling it.
I’d be lying if I said I never ripped photos from listings on a certain popular online auction platform when selling stuff online (before the ubiquity of digital cameras and smartphones)
Looking back it used to be way less advanced than what they have now, makes me wonder how this compares with flock.
Thieves will just ask their favorite chat bot to change the background of the photo.
So you can find the place where car thieves took it to take pictures, already knowing which city it was in from the ad. How useful is that!
Founder of GeoSpy here,
Thanks for the post, AMA for anyone into computer vision or AI.
:)
Articles seem to only go back to around 2024, how about 1.0? What was major enough to finally reach 1.0? Would be great to have a more technical blog post about what kind of major breakthroughs were discovered while developing this since the first discovery of this in 2022.
Why do you have a folder called “thotDBSmash”? What were you collecting there and why?
how much legal fund you prepare
Ha, the first photo is Alamo Square looking up Fulton.
> Thieves often post stolen vehicles for sale on platforms like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist
That seems like a stretch. That wouldn't even make sense for them to do. Strange claim to make.
>The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is urging New York City residents to exercise caution when purchasing cars online, as they have recently identified a surge in the sale of stolen vehicles.
>As of Oct. 15 (2024), the DMV reports that it has recovered 228 stolen vehicles amounting to a value of $6.35 million. Of the 228 vehicles recovered this year, 149 were purchased by an unsuspecting victim after seeing a post on Facebook Marketplace or a similar site.
That is 65% of recovered stolen vehicles in New York was sold through online marked places.
https://www.silive.com/crime-safety/2024/10/stolen-vehicles-...
I am curious of
1) How many total stolen vehicles there were
And
2) If 65% of recovered ones being from Marketplace means only the low-hanging fruit were found.
"From 1997 through 2022, reported thefts decreased 67 percent. In 2022, however, there was a dramatic increase in vehicles reported stolen: 26,653, representing a 112 percent increase from the 12,573 reported stolen in 2019."
From https://apps.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/docs/FINAL%20202...
It's very common with bikes, it wouldn't surprise me if they do it with cars too. I found my own stolen bike for sale on Facebook but still wasn't able to recover it. They just use a stolen or anonymized Facebook account so you can't easily figure out who is selling it.
I once saw a story about someone who saw her bike on sale even before it was stolen. The thieves announce the bikes they see regularly in the same place in the street and only steal them if they have a potential buyer.
That way they only take the risk when they need to, they don't need any storage area, and if they are caught it is only for 1 bike, not tens or hundreds.
I can't believe we're dropshipping stolen goods now.
What did you think Amazon resellers platform is for?
Dropshipping goods from China
No, that's what Fulfilled by Amazon is for
I have to say, I'm quite impressed with the intelligence of those particular bastards. I don't approve, but I have to admit that's so smart.
When you or a friend show up to a public place to buy it, it’s usually pretty clear who’s selling it.
Tried that but I guess they got suspicious and didn't show up, or sold it to someone else before me.
PSA for anyone with a bike: register it on https://bikeindex.org/. I registered mine there the day it was stolen and almost immediately got emails from several people who were monitoring a known bike thief's Marketplace account and saw mine listed.
Strange to speak so definitively about a world you clearly aren’t familiar with.
You’re speaking pretty definitely too. Got any citations to back up your claims?
What claims?
> Strange to speak so definitively about a world you clearly aren’t familiar with.
I’m guessing you know the OP with great familiarity?
Their boldly wrong comment tells their lack of experience (and indeed knowledge) within this topic.
You can tell because…the immediate reply (from other users) included government notices indicating the reality they weren’t aware of.
My point was that your comment was a low effort personal attack and contributed nothing. As well as itself being ironic.
The HN guidelines explicitly say one should avoid such comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Don't be snarky
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Your point wasn’t subtle - just wrong.
The comment I replied to did nothing but detract from the conversation,
and attack the original commenter’s sense and logic - despite the original commenter being correct!
> That seems like a stretch. That wouldn't even make sense for them to do. Strange claim to make.
Not a stretch.
Makes perfect sense.
Not strange, unusual, or uncommon!
& a quick search would have shown them the blind spot
Maybe it was a blind spot for you, too - based on your responses.
(^THAT’S what getting personal and off-topic looks like)
Link the guidelines to the commenter I replied to, instead of users following them.
TrashFuture recently did a show on this company with the guy from Blood Work. Unfortunately it it's behind a paywall, but it's a great episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo0gualrJa4
Go to 5:30 for a taste
"Try our demo!"
Okay then, thinks EB, mentally trying to decide which photos to try it with.
"Look here's a picture of a place, and here's a pin on a map that shows you where it is!"
Yeah, I can do that without AI.
Nice idea. Maybe do it for bicycles which are often more unique/personalized. Also, how are they going to identify identical model/trim/color cars when the license plates have been removed or switched?
Sounds more like “vehicle recovery” for the repossession market first and foremost.
A repo investigator for the bank locates the target vehicle via owner’s social media, takes photo of the car, shoots it into GeoSpy, then ganks the car based on given locations in the owner’s photos. Pair it up with ALPR hits across a city from national ALPR networks (to help correlate home/business/work patterns) and… wellp, there you go!
You can even skip the investigator in a lot of places, thanks to Flock. Dystopian.
wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy your location from a data broker?
You can even skip the investigator in a lot of places, thanks to Flock. Dystopian.
Flock is an ALPR.
can we use this to finally prove the moon landing is a hoax!!!
I mean comparisons already exist showing matching landmarks between apollo photos and topography from orbiting satellites
This entire demo is just a surveillance state dog-whistle.
"It's used for car theft!" except the intended use is obviously target government buyers for tracking citizens.
Nothing like an OSINT company like Bellingcat hasn't done before, it's just that in those cases it was done on citizens belonging to adversary countries. It was just a matter of time, I guess.
What?
See how Bellingcat was "reverse" finding the identities of Russian citizens based on the cars they were owning. Too lazy to search for the exact links, this was around 2020-2021, something like that.
Later edit: Something like this [1], from late 2020: "Russian Vehicle Registration Leak Reveals Additional GRU Hackers". There were also some other articles with Google StreetView screenshots and the like, I won't search for them because even finding this one reference means I'm not doing something better with my time right now.
[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/10/22/russian-...