Interesting. On the surface this looks like a complex question with
many layers of nuance and spheres of interest. Underneath there's one
inconvenient question being avoided that bothers me.<p>It <i>is</i> a slippery slope into a vile dystopia of mutually suspicious
snitches. A society of people all filming each other, looking for
minor transgressions is no kind of society at all. Just wait until the
face recognition corpus is fair game and apps start popping up to ID
strangers with shifty eyes and too swarthy skin. On the other hand,
millions are injured on the roads, many drivers are idiots, and cars
are so 20th century anyway. I can see how hostility foments on both
sides.<p>What is really going on here? I think we are killing the social
contract by a thousand cuts. Isn't the cause that the police and local
officials responsible for managing traffic don't do their job -
usually because they are understaffed, underfunded and demotivated?
This set s up a downward spiral. We are abandoning an expectation that
our institutions of justice can and will do their job, because
"there's an app for that!", and so a vigilante society needs to step up
in their place. Apps like this tacitly condone disestablishment of
police and law courts (of course they claim to merely 'complement'
them), and by osmosis open the door for Big Tech to usurp their place
(Cue app-store "police approved" calibrated apps that cut out the cops
and just issue the ticket).<p>Also, what countermeasures will soon be available to drivers in this
technological arms race? Giving every citizen the power to be a cop
has the hidden effect of giving everyone an equal and opposite motive
to be a criminal. Much as I'd love to help prosecute the assholes who
speed around my neighborhood I don't see this ending well in the long
run.
This is a very simple case. There is no nuance. People who regularly speed are mad that this will make them face the consequences for their habit of breaking the law. If they want to chance the law to make speeding suggestions instead of speeding limits they should do that. But outside that they are plainly and simply wrong in everything.<p>comparing this to stasi is comically stupid. It’s nothing like that. And people have been able to report you for breaking the law all along. This app is just helping collect the evidence and facilitate the process to a point where the cops won’t throw out the case without any action straight off.
This class of citizen-vs-citizen law enforcement should be outlawed entirely. The inevitable result is greater societal division and hostility. They create more problems than they solve.<p>Operant conditioning research has shown conclusively that punishment does not work for remediating undesirable behavior. Instead, it makes individuals defensive, evasive, and hostile toward the punisher. It is one thing to have punishment meted out by the State under code of law, and quite another to be targeted by members of the public.
This is an important point:<p><i>The app cannot lead to drivers receiving speeding tickets. Since Speedcam Anywhere’s algorithm has not been vetted by the Home Office, it is not legally a speed camera, and cannot provide sufficient evidence for a police force to issue a prosecution for speeding...</i><p>If you want to make the roads here safer, what we need is more resources to put real traffic cops on patrol, with proper training, the ability to deal with the full range of traffic offences, and proper equipment that creates admissible evidence.<p>What we don't need is more wannabe heroes who have very strong opinions but often very little understanding of what actually makes the roads safer, wasting some of the few resources the real law enforcement authorities do have on complaints that cannot possibly lead to a successful prosecution even if they're otherwise accurate, which inevitably they won't always be.<p>Obviously there are also legitimate concerns about vigilantism, road rage, and excessive reliance on laws creating absolute offences that might be easier to enforce but aren't necessarily the best ways to penalise actually dangerous or inconsiderate driving. However in this case those are largely academic discussions because there is no way an app like this is ever going to clear the hurdle mentioned above anyway.