The real purpose of this app isn't the rating system, that's just the hook to get people to run this app and point the camera out their dashboards. The real purpose is to crowdsource collecting data about the drivers on the road in order to sell that data to interested parties.
It really sounds like a slapped on excuse for the next incarnation of the data collection biz. How would they generate revenue if not by selling the collected data to 3rd parties? Because imo that is the most straightforward option. Missing this bit entirely in the article is disingenuous and concerning.
I'm not too sure about opaque code rating drivers either, though people might be ok with it.
They already do this. BUT maybe this will provide benefit for customers.
And since its collecting ALL data, including visual and audio, this is a voluntary spy device. Imagine if the government demanded that data be handed over and starts using that to spy on people. IMO this is not a stretch of the imagination.
Meh, all the purposes are real. It's a win-win. Get warned of idiots, collect data that will be useful to insurers (and probably to self driving cars too, I can imagine Google cars giving detected hotheads a wide berth).
I can see one group of people having a legit beef with this though: car rental companies. One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap.
That's imagining this system in the most perfect light: shiny, new and not gamed.
The opportunities for misinformation and asymmetricality are huge. Don't like someone? Clone their license plate for a day and drive like an ass. How could you ever prove your innocence?
Loan your car to a friend and they could tarnish your reputation. It would make it inhibitive to share vehicles.
This is technology that drives us farther apart as people in favor of a few insurance companies making even more profit than they do already. Think critically.
It would also give police even more excuses to profile innocent people.
If you want people to drive more safely, then think up ways to get more people to drive more safely. Don't expand the surveillance mechanism to every moving vehicle.
The point being, once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot. Even the safest drivers make stupid moves. Even worse, by what metric is an idiot made? I drive aggressively, trying to find open space on the road whenever I can. To do this I speed and otherwise make abrupt lane changes. If I'm on a road trip and someone is following me too closely I'll speed up to 140 MPH to put some distance between us in short order. The thing is, I've never been in an accident and have literally raced cars on the Nurburgring in Germany without incident. I have a driving style which works for me and works for others around me as I'm not in accidents and I don't cause accidents. My mother-in-law on the other hand who drives five under everywhere and by most people's metrics is a safe driver has been in two accidents in the last five years. Neither of which were her fault of course (said with some sarcasm).
All I can see this accomplishing is adding yet one more gadget app for people to be distracted by.
> The point being, once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot.
I tell this to anyone who rages: You drive and meet a LOT of people on your way. You don't make a lot of mistakes, but you make a few at least every drive.
Now given that you meet a lot of people you are most likely seeing a ton of mistakes by people. But individually they are not really making many mistakes.
Sure some people are horrible, but not all. And often the horrible ones are behind you.
And also, no matter how "safe" you are, it only takes 1 mistake to kill a person. Example, yesterday I was driving, a guy went nuts behind me and almost killed a motorcyclist. I saw that and it distracted me long enough to almost not notice the car that short-stopped in front of me. Literally 2 more seconds and it would have been a wreck. And I consider myself a safe driver, but it only takes one moment of distraction.
Honestly, I bathe in idiocy because it works. One of the "tricks" I've picked up is that if I'm being tailgated in town or someone is otherwise driving next to me and won't stop I'll turn off traction control and "light up" the rear end of my car. Everyone 'scatters' at that point. A lot of people don't understand this driving style. I look like a complete idiot, but people pay attention to the idiots. They watch them, they hang back, thus making the idiot a lot safer. My car stops from 60 to 0 in 97 feet. It takes someone in the average sedan nearly twice as far. The further I can keep those people away from me the better. When I'm driving I'm engaged. I drive a low fast sports car which requires full engagement. This makes me the safest person on the road no matter how bad I look to other drivers. This is a key concept when on a motorcycle as well. If you are blending in by being "good", no one is paying attention to you. If you are driving a loud bike, speeding up and slowing down aggressively, popping wheelies, and otherwise behaving like an ass, you are visible. Scare those around you and those around you will give you room and on the road and room is king.
I agree to an extent. I also drive "like an idiot" and haven't been in an accident aside from being t-boned in traffic when a very old person didn't stop for a red light. I'm also very engaged while driving and pay lots of attention to everything going on around me. I don't listen to music or eat or have children or do phone calls while driving. I also consider driving a hobby / sport and value continual life-long improvement in it. I practice in realistic driving games and I've been doing so since I was very young. I'm very interested in participating in track days and auto cross events. I do most of my own car maintenance, drive a manual, and I know how my vehicle works in quite deep detail. I also know how it handles at and beyond the limit, when it will break loose in the front and rear, how quickly it can stop and accelerate, how hard it can swerve.
This app and the related one about insurance liability (posted here maybe a week or two ago) would unfairly rate me, because I go against the risk model and win consistently. I also agree that there are MANY "safe" drivers whose indecision and timid driving leads to bad situations; merging at 45mph, slowing way down for ramps, stoping at yield signs, driving under the speed of traffic, braking unnecessarily in traffic, etc. However, since in my situation, the insurance company gets to charge me a lot more, they're incentivized against modeling drivers like me as less risky than someone who is involved in more accidents than me but drives well within the limits and doesn't understand what happens when they approach or exceed them.
I'm in exactly your same boat. Do all the work on my car myself, only drive a manual, know how my tires will perform on various pavement at various temperatures, wear driving shoes, leave the radio off, etc., because I'm an enthusiast. A few years ago I was teaching my son to drive on slick roads so we were spinning cookies, doing bootlegger turns, and using engine power rather than braking to get out of situations in the county fairgrounds parking lot. There was no one around, nothing to run into, but yet a local officer started circling us on the perimeter lot road, at which point I had my son back off for safety reasons since there was another car in the parking lot. Anyway, he decided to light us up, then threatened my son and myself (because he had a learners permit) with reckless driving charges. And so it is in the US, land of the ignorant when it comes to actually learning how to drive or having the ability to teach our kids how to drive in an abandoned parking lot. I much, much, much prefer Germany in this regard. They really do get it on this front.
Maybe there'll be an opportunity to drill down in the data. There's a huge wide spectrum of people who suck at driving (senile old people, oblivious soccer mom, boy-racer, etc) and I would be very surprised if they're all roughly equivalent.
Minor nit: I think your comment would be greatly enhanced if you changed some stereotypes, e.g. "soccer-mom" for "soccer-parent", "senile old" for "old" or "people with less reflexes" and "boy-racer" for just "racer". None of those relate 100% to the gender or age of the driver, IMHO :)
I can imagine a lot of applications for these types of systems:
identifying undercover traffic police cars,
finding whether someone is following you,
identifying friend's cars (similar to FB's "Share your location")
People would love such systems (and I'm afraid our privacy is gone for good).
This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam — why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem?
The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.
More than that really. If every stranger who sees you on the street can (or worse, automatically does) instantly share that they saw you to a giant database that can then be easily searched it changes the act of "seeing". Now you can be virtually followed at any time by anyone anywhere who can use the database.
No one can be drowned by a raindrop. A flood is another matter.
> This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam
If I'm not that one person I'd have a problem with that.
> why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem?
Switching from dash cams to police helps a bit. I think most people would be okay with one (or a handful) of police officers randomly walking through their neighborhood. Most locales would say it's a good thing.
Now take that to the extreme and have an officer every 10 steps, looking around in every direction, and writing down everything that's happening. Still a good idea?
Now put license plate readers facing every direction on every police car and send that information to a database where it's stored forever. Now link it to every other license plate scanner across the country, and make searching through someone's trips as easy as using a TiVo, with complete history on their location. You don't have to imagine though, because they do this today: http://gothamist.com/2016/01/26/license_plate_readers_nypd.p...
Maybe it has to do with the fact that they're recording all license plates they see, regardless of what they're doing or if they did anything wrong.
They will in fact know where you are and what your driving habits are.
Apart from your driving behavior, this is surely also going to be something they're going to want to sell to various companies that would find this interesting.
In Germany at least you could get into serious trouble. Dashcams are a grey area in German law. The consensus seems to be currently that they're okay for personal use, but making the video public certainly puts you at risk of a lawsuit.
If you create a database of license plates (profiles) of all cars on the road along with their whereabouts and behavior at any given time, and then sell this information to the highest bidder.... you would be a bit wrong.
Absolutely, since it would amount to trial by media, where a person is found guilty / slandered as an asshole with no avenue to defend his position / state his case.
What if he was driving like an asshole because he was speeding to the hospital or similar reasons?
Exactly. The crux of prejudice is that it makes people form an opinion before they have facts a.k.a. context. A lot of things are not what they seem at first and because people respond to well to "Occam's Razor," they choose the laziest explanation and penalize people they don't know.
A real-life example: my friend was dating a woman whose brother got in an accident. After receiving painkillers, he became addicted to them (an old story at this point). As he weened himself off of them, taking responsibility, my friend would drive him to get methadone a few times a week. A system that uses information from this one would label my friend an addict because he was so often seen driving to or parked at the rehab clinic. When in fact, my friend was a charitable, stand-up guy helping out a soon-to-be family member recover and become a stronger, productive member of society.
Just like credit scores. Their models aren't perfect, but the threshold for useful (for their benefit) is much lower, and profitable lower still. Since you're the product being sold and they're OK with many defects, and given that there are no financial consequences for you getting rolled up in a bad / inaccurate / predatory model, they don't care and aren't incentivized to fix it (and in fact in many cases are incentivized financially to keep it broken, since "hits" like that can be a selling point).
I wonder how well this will scale with time. I've certainly done things while driving that were reckless to varying degrees, I suspect most drivers have as well. How long until 50% of cars on the road have been tagged doing something reckless? Of course I can imagine a number of ways to handle this.
On a more broad note, I wonder how useful it really is to know that a specific vehicle acted recklessly sometime in the past. Seeing someone behaving poorly is good reason to avoid them on the roadway. However I also imagine a scenario where one driver did something to warrant an alert, and some time later every car on the roadway is trying to avoid that vehicle. Is there really any danger from that vehicle in the current situation?
What I would like to see is a map showing where the most incidents occur, and what type of incidents occur there. I assume most drivers genuinely set out intending to behave well, but do not for various reasons. Identifying locations where incidents happen would give civil engineers some valuable data about how their designs impact behavior, and would give police valuable information about where their presence would be useful.
I presume that the system would simply indicate the proportion of times that a vehicle is seen driving and performing a dodgy manoeuvre. If I'm seen on the roads 1,000 times and seen performing a dodgy lane change once (and I would like to apologise to the Mondeo driver on the A21 yesterday), that's the fact that should be recorded.
The thing is that there's not a 1:1 relationship between a "risky" maneuver and causing an accident. An example could be an F1 driver who takes curves at 20mph over the recommended speed in a sports car. Compare this mentally to a Prius driver who drives under the speed limit in the left lane. The Prius driver is "being safe" but causing a long line of tailgaters and people passing unsafely on the right, as well as agitating people and causing them to drive more aggressively. I doubt that the first few iterations of this system will take psychological effects on other drivers into account (if they ever consider that / have a profit motive to do so at all).
There is definitely a gradient of severity with "reckless" driving.
Have you ever driven full speed through a red light? Sat at a complete stop of a freeway in an attempt to merge in to traffic? Taken a U-turn on a freeway? There are things that don't cause an accident, but once a driver does, they should probably not be allowed behind the wheel for at least a year, some things possibly even a lifetime ban or some additional evaluation.
There is an interesting dichotomy because smart phone usage has really caused a big problem with distracted driving. Even Geico experienced an increase in claims last year, and I suspect this was why. When I watch traffic sometimes over 50% of drivers are looking at a phone screen rather than the road. At the same time, mobile sensors are enabling something which will end with roads being extremely safe and killing very small numbers of humans a year.
There is a lot of talk about privacy and freedom on the internet. Privacy and freedom on the road is dead in all dimensions. You won't be anonymous, you won't be able to take go somewhere when the police/authorities are looking for you, there may not even be private ownership of any vehicles in the US in 10-15 years.
Assuming that insurance is correctly priced, buying a policy in any form is negative expected value. The companies that write such policies would slowly bleed dry if that wasn't the case. However, that's irrelevant unless you have the bankroll to withstand tail risk. Given that most people don't, as a society, you pretty much have to make things like auto liability insurance compulsory.
If you're a "good driver," as defined by a lack of tickets and accidents, you get discounts. There's really no way to tell if you're _actually_ a "good driver" because "good driver" is a hidden variable, and the only observables from an insurance standpoint are tickets or accidents. I know horrible drivers who never have accidents and avoid tickets via luck or skill. Conversely, you can be a good driver who's unlucky enough to have multiple accidents in a short period of time. Outcomes = baseline truth + random noise.
Most corporate data grabs bad news, but I'm ok with it when it comes to pricing insurance (outside of health). If I run a business that has rock solid, well enforced policies in place to mitigate risk, I don't want the insurance company's priors over my company's sector driving the premium. I only want to pay for coverage on idiosyncratic risk - the risk that remains after addressing everything that I can. Same goes for driving habits. Things like health are almost entirely idiosyncratic risk (ergo, let's agree that doing this for health is a bad thing), but when that's not the case pricing policies using true states (the baseline) and not observables (baseline + noise) puts you as the policy buyer more in control, not less.
That said, I have major concerns over the implementation. A breach is all but inevitable, so there needs to be a means of updating models online, and rules against data retention. It's also bad news if flawed models or corner cases incorrectly price someone out of a policy and there's no sanity check. Unfortunately, that's not too different from the actuarial status quo.
> Assuming that insurance is correctly priced, buying a policy in any form is negative expected value
Actually it's quite rare for insurance companies to record an underwriting profit, I believe. Their profit generally comes from investing the pool of premiums. If you invested your premium instead of buying insurance however, then I suppose the expected return would have to be better.
Yes that's totally correct but they're factoring the entire reinsurance/reinvestment pipeline into how aggressively they can price the policy in the first place.
Most people on HN knew about expected value but they don't know too much about expected utility. I suggested reading about it and St. Petersburg paradox
> Nexar will face some ethical dilemmas. For example, should the app inform users when it spots a license plate that’s the subject of an Amber Alert?
Absolutely. I'm not one to normally fall victim to the mindless "think of the children", but Amber Alerts are rare and specific enough that they seem perfectly useful and legitimate usage of this tech. (I find most of the rest of the tech between useless and invasive, but flagging Amber Alert tags I'd support.)
Here's where I believe "think of the children" madness works in favor of people who think like I do. Law enforcement and the DoJ will be very reluctant to start issuing Amber Alerts for drug dealers, bank robbers, bail skippers, and the like. Even missing elderly get Silver Alerts (where they could have just as easily be lumped into Amber Alerts).
Amber Alerts for my area come to my cell phone and I can't recall getting more than one per year. Looking up stats for 2014, they ranged from 9-21 per month (nationwide). I'm pretty comfortable that surveillance over-reaches will be a long time coming to Amber Alerts (if ever).
FWIW, Amber Alerts have already begun to include domestic custody battles, and whether one considers bringing the general public into a domestic dispute is an overreach or not, I guess is up to you.
In my area, until I turned them off, I received at least 2 alerts per week and the vast majority of these were domestic-related (as in, one true parent of the child had the child when they were not legally allotted to - and the other parent reported it).
FWIW, Amber Alerts have already begun to include domestic custody battles
From my observation Amber Alerts have always been domestic squabbles. Before I turned them off on every device in the house, I don't recall a one that wasn't a divorce dispute. In other words, not a one was a reason to make every phone in the office make noise. In other other words, we collectively found out that all of these "abductions" wouldn't fit within the definition that most of us use for the word.
This strikes me as one of those great and terrible ideas. It has a tremendous potential for good, but it is one opt-out checkbox (Share the data you collect with the police to help catch criminals!) away from convincing the surveilled to create their own big brother.
I'd expected autonomous vehicles to do it, but not that it would be a business targeted at drivers. Not clear what the end user benefit is. A system that recognizes unmarked police cars would have a market, but there would probably be objections to that.
As is typical today, it uploads all the data to a server and the service operator keeps all the rights to the data. Sigh.
Using it to pass around hard braking info is not useful, though. That's what radars are good for. They'll always see the car ahead, whether it's equipped or not. The widespread use of radar-controlled auto-braking is the next big thing in auto safety. BMW, Mercedes, etc. already have it, so it's a proven technology. Not car to car communications, which don't solve any non-advertising related problem.
There seems to be a disturbing trend of Israeli developers creating software that crosses some serious ethical lines. A few offhand: this, an iPhone backdoor exploit they're hiding and have provided to the us government, I believe the biggest license plate reader developer is Israeli.
Can anyone speak to this? Am I observing this on some kind of bias?
This is probably just confirmation bias on your part. That being said, based on the political situation in Israel and the security culture in that country, it isn't surprising that many tech companies there would be developing tools that perpetuate that status quo. As a contrast, you would probably never see an app like this coming out of a hackathon in Gaza.[0]
It's not just you. With a heritage of Soviet-era immigrants and an atmosphere of paranoia, the space of "technological solutions" in Israel looks different than it does in other cultures. If I had a moment (in a meeting atm), I'd go through and research some of the strides their scientists have been making in oppressive technology.
Also, Stephen Hawking himself has recently participated in a boycott of Israel: [1]
Why won't the app report every tiny detail on the driver it knows best... You? This seems like a sure fire way to invite yourself to higher insurance rates and a big presence in every law enforcement database that tracks peoples' movements.
There'd have to be a very big reward for me voluntarily becoming Big Brother, and especially for tattling on myself.
Great who needs debate around static ALPR (license plate readers) data collection when we will soon have swarm of cars running with connected dashcams. The resolution is already good enough for face recognition on bystanders/people crossing street. Things will get even more interesting once we get self driving cars equipped with omnidirectional video recording capabilities.
I am very interested in what can be done, with such data. I am currently working with long duration (>20 minutes) dashcam videos uploaded by users to youtube.
Why would the government want to spend the money and PR capital developing and rolling that out, when they can have a company do it for free, take the heat, chest beat about private enterprise, and then secretly NSL subpoena or crack it and distribute the intelligence to every interested agency, police department, and eventually favored corporate interest (using parallel construction as needed)?
Man this is a really creep company. What do they imagine their business model really is? The warning thing is not a good business. Presumably they really want to sell this data to insurance companies.
Actually this isn't a bad business model iMO they sell the data to insurance companies and you can lower your insurance costs.
And while your insurance cost might also go up if it deems you to be a reckless driver that can also have a good impact because it can force you to drive more safely in order to bring your insurance costs back down.
If they can incorporate the app with some instructional service like a weekly summary of all the misstakes you make and give you say 5 tips to drive better it can actually have quite a positive effect on road safety.
And while it's a bit "creepy" I see this to be pretty much similar to insurance companies "paying you" to quit smoking even sending you to "free" quitting smoking seminars/workshops or "paying you" to go to the Gym often even with a free yearly subscription.
Those things cost pennies to the insurance companies while saving them a lot of money in the long run, only a handful of less lung cancer cases or heart attacks a year can cover the cost of those programs for 1000's if not 10,000's of policies.
The company representative has been spamming Reddit with their videos* and advertisements as well in the various car crash related subreddits. It is getting really old seeing "NexarGuy" next to another link to a video plastered with their advertisement banner.
*By "their videos" I mean videos from users using the application that get uploaded to their servers and posted to their YouTube channel.
Today I pulled into a turn lane and stopped alongside the car ahead of me to let them know their brake lights were out. Had to honk incessantly to get their attention. Then I waited in the wrong lane (no one behind me) to pull back into my original lane to go straight through the light.
Probably would get a demerit from an AI for that maneuver.
Pulling into a turn lane, stopping alongside another car and honking incessantly is dangerous and against the law. The other driver was probably scared and trying to ignore you.
No, they'll get a fine for driving a defective vehicle and be require to make-good and attend vehicle inspection to prove. The all seeing AI enables strict enforcement.
Hopefully this can seed the discussion of privacy implications for tracking a driver's actions, especially tied to the (sort of) unique ID that is their vehicle's license plate.
I wonder if they'll be able to tell when someone else is driving your car from the "fingerprint" of their driving style.
There was an article recently about obd2 scanners recording information such as throttle application, brake pressure, etc and after recording information for 15 minutes could determine with X% accuracy who was driving and after 60 minutes of data, could fingerprint who was driving with 97 (or maybe it was 100%?) Accuracy.
My roommate in grad school developed a somewhat related idea but for identifying someone's "typing cadence". He used it for an additional security factor in the way that a person types their passwords in a browser.
I read an article about search engines using autocomplete keystroke timing for user fingerprinting, but can't find it at the moment. Wikipedia has a few references, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics
There are quite a few solutions out there that use bioinformatics to develop a signature of the user.
Google has one, a few banks use it to identify potential fraud cases appearntly even simple things about how you navigate a webpage can produce a fairly unique fingerprint even across different devices.
Neat stuff, but I think that particular study had a pretty small sample size (~100). It would work from telling mom from mom or junior, but not so well at picking the zip car driver from a pool of all zip car drivers.
I've considered building something like this for bikes.
For those who aren't cyclists, there are already informal networks of people who share helmet-cam videos of bad driving behaviour, with people who attempt to read license plates etc
In my experience as both a cyclist and a driver in the Bay Area, I have no interest in the opinions of other cyclists on driver behavior. Cyclists largely disregard the rules of the road and then blame drivers.
As a driver, I have been at the receiving end of abusive gestures and language even when following the law. In one case, I yielded to a bicyclist who was in blatant violation of the law[0], because failure to do so would have endangered him. He showed me his middle finger. Another was angry that I was in the bicycle lane making a right-hand turn, as required by law and common sense.
As a cyclist, I have given up trying to educate my fellow cyclists, and generally won't ride with others anymore.
[0]I was already turning through the intersection after having made a stop. The bicyclist arrived in the middle of my turn and entered the intersection without stopping for the stop sign.
>As a cyclist, I have given up trying to educate my fellow cyclists, and generally won't ride with others anymore.
I don't know about the bay area, but in my city you can't really group ride, bike roads are single lanes. Yet people ride side by side all the time.
Personally, I found the best way to change the culture is to show an example. There is clearly an ongoing bicycle boom, and it shows many just follow the customs e.g. dashing through reds is acceptable (which is debatable) but it quickly turns out stopping for 20 seconds is not that big of a problem.
It is quite interesting though, the same people would never do that in a car.
Cameras frequently fail to capture context and released footage is often edited. Cameras often serve to justify existing biases.
I recently watched a video compilation put together by a truck driver who intended to show the dangerous behavior of passenger vehicles. It showed what it intended, but it also showed dangerous truck driver behavior. When this behavior was pointed out, the truck drivers in the comment section came up with many excuses for why this behavior was acceptable. One actually argued that in one of the scenarios the truck driver should not have had to yield (despite being required to do so by law) because accelerating back up to speed was expensive in terms of fuel.
So there was proof positive that this truck driver not only violated the law, but created an unsafe situation in a video specifically edited to show it was not truck drivers but passenger vehicles which caused unsafe situations, and this group of truck drivers defended the behavior.
In that case, the truck driver was ignorant and stupid. His behavior wasn't changed. And I see that a lot in YouTube videos about drivers of vehicle X complaining about drivers of vehicle Y. Anyone pointing out mistakes made by the driver of vehicle X is shouted down, nonsense about what is legal is posted (most of it wrong or incomplete), and everyone who drives a vehicle X shares their own (possibly apocryphal) stories about people driving vehicle Y.
So no, even with camera, I don't care much about the opinions of cyclists on drivers. Cameras can be good, but they can also be bad or indifferent, and nine times out of ten, I've got questions even after seeing the video.
1) Only have the information for licence plate codes of people who have opted in be stored in a way associated with the specific licence plate code.
2) Have the system encourage opting in as part of setting up the system in one's own car.
3) Have an id which is used for all cars which have not opted in, so that cars which have not opted in have a collective rating. Possibly split this up by general location, and maybe time of day.
4) Because most of the cars in a given area are there often (or, at least something similar to this is true) , it may be worthwhile for, for the cars that do not opt in, to still record behavior of those cars, but to not send it to a central location, only keeping it within one's own car. Cars which have not been seen in a long time can be automatically removed from the local storage. This should not significantly harm privacy, because it is basically the same as remembering that you saw that car before and that it tended to be driven poorly.
5) Possibly (this might always be pointless/counterproductive. I'm not sure.) , in some cases only store a hash of the license plate codes, instead of the license plate code itself?
A) I think this variation should be sufficient to protect privacy, because it only does widespread collection about identifiable individuals if they they consent to it. The information it collects about individuals that did not specifically (and presumably intentionally) express consent is only collected in aggregate about individuals in a geographic region, which does not personally identify anyone, or only collected by individuals and not shared, which is not much more of a privacy violation than an individual with excellent memory looking around.
B) So, while this variation might be less effective, I think it should be sufficient to protect privacy.
In the UK a few years ago there were reports of people's license plate numbers being duplicated and stuck onto vehicles that matched the genuine vehicle's description and then used for various crimes, like filling up with petrol and driving off without paying.
This tech would be susceptible in a similar manner - stolen vehicle goes out and drives badly etc. etc. The only identifier would be the licence plate. How about using their phone account as the identifier rather than the vehicle?
Anyway sounds like an idea ripe for misuse and "feature creep".
I'm all for this. Especially in Bay Area traffic. It looks like about 95% of the time I get some tailgater because I leave enough room in front of my car to brake. If I dont' want to get tailgated, I end up tailgating. I seriously wish these people would either shape up or stop driving cars altogether.
Small issue to potentially give up privacy for. This is rather a job for the police and sensibilisation campaigns.
Also think of this way: if you both tailgate, and you have to brake, you will be hitting both the one in front of you, and getting hit in the back. If you don't tailgate and only get tailgated, you will only get hit in the back. (And have a way better defence for your insurance company.)
(PS I'm going to assume this is tailgating on the highway ?)
I should probably be horrified by the privacy implications, but I'm really not. I'm already trying to tone down some of the headgames that I've learned to play while driving. This would help by allowing me to just let everything slide and upload the video tagging data later.
These kinds of apps are inevitable. We will see apps that rate drivers, workers, and just people. I'm not as worried about the apps, but rather with someone gaming the rankings.
Both Yelp and Travelocity turned from awesome to pretty much useless within a few years. Reviews and ratings can be bought. Employees are forced to leave positive reviews.
Yup, they're inventing another game to play here, just like credit scores. If you know that you're playing a game and you understand the rules, you can usually figure out how to play better than most while investing the minimum amount of time playing. If you don't know that you're playing a game or you aren't aware of the rules, you'll spend a lot of time being upset and losing money, typically.
It's also true with credit cards. If you don't understand merchant fees and maximizing your rewards from purchases you'd otherwise make while simultaneously bolstering your credit score, you're leaving money on the table.
Humans will hopefully look back in a few hundred years and realize how futile and terrible of an idea it was to attempt to gamify every aspect of our lives so some company or another can extract a profit from the unsavvy, but since there is so much "value" to be "created" right now, I doubt that it'll happen any time soon under our current system of governance and beliefs about property, taxes, "free" markets, etc.
Car is a very crappy identifier. I've bought my car used, so at least one other irrelevant person (that is NOT ME) drove it. It also gets driven by my girlfriend and on two occasions by my two non drinking friends.
I read somewhere that the app doesn't only rate the drivers around you, but also looks at the person running the app and rates his/her driving. Add the inner facing camera recording they're using and why anyone would want to actively participate in something like this is beyond me.
