Big Brotheresque App Kills Your Automotive Anonymity
wired.com
wired.com
This is nothing but vigilantism.
It's a seriously flawed system and I hope no insurance companies adopt it.
And compared to some of the predictors that insurance companies currently use (age, sex, income, marital status), number of complaints seems like a much better predictor to me.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who uses this app should probably have their insurance raised much more than any individual drivers who are reported.
Also I feel I must again correct this misconception that mere reporting of violations of the law is somehow equivalent to unauthorized meting out of punishment for lawbreaking. Vigilantism and reporting crimes are two different things.
I would be willing to bet that you'd be very hard pressed to prove that the majority of the reports in a system like this actually contain factual information. When you report a traffic violation to law enforcement they are going to either investigate themselves or expect you to be able to positively identify the driver and show up in court. This gives the other driver the ability to defend themselves as well as forcing you to prove your statement. None of those requirements exist in the system described.
> ... especially when its recipient is a legal authority...
The DMV is not a legal authority for processing traffic violations. Law enforcement and the courts are. The DMV will provide that information to the insurance company after any fines are paid or court decisions are rendered but they are not the legal authority.
> ... someone who might be liable for the bad behavior reported
The insurance companies would probably love to get reports about bad behavior of their drivers so that they could more aggressively adjust rates however they would still have to deal with the fact that there's really no way to prove that any of these complaints are legitimate. What's to stop your ex girlfriend and her six friends from each reporting you over the course of a month or two for traffic violations to screw with you? How does this application or your insurance company filter that information out? Going off of actual cited/fined traffic violations seems to be a much more secure accounting method.
> Is informing an employer of an employee's unsafe driving vigilantism?
Absolutely not, the employer has advertised that they want to know about bad driving by placing the sticker on the vehicle and the employee has accepted that as part of their employment. The driver of that vehicle however is not absolved of any legal responsibility by also being accountable to their employer, that is a separate deal. You have no obligation to report bad drivers to their employers and may instead go straight to law enforcement. One of the benefits of those programs is to keep law enforcement from becoming involved in the first place and can be considered liability mitigation. This is not the same as side stepping law enforcement and going straight to the insurance company of a driver, in fact this application would be like skipping the employer and reporting the driver to the employers liability insurer for the report.
> Because the actors in that case have analogous financial and moral roles as the ones in this.
The employer and the insurance company have analogous financial and moral roles however they have no authority to enforce traffic laws. Employers have an incentive for you to bypass law enforcement, other drivers on the road don't.
There is already a legal process for dealing with these issues and an application that goes around them to mete out punishment seems to fit the description of vigilantism as you've provided it.
In the US, where I live, you can make legally make reputation-damaging accusations without proving them to be true. Only in cases where the accusations can be proven false is making such an accusation illegal. Personally I think that's a fine system and would be sufficient to keep people mostly honest when reporting others using this app. There is not a whole lot of reason to use a traffic app to try and harm someone when so many more direct means are available.
> The DMV will provide that information to the insurance company after any fines are paid or court decisions are rendered but they are not the legal authority.
Then I imagine they will just discard the reports, and no harm has been done.
> What's to stop your ex girlfriend and her six friends from each reporting you over the course of a month or two for traffic violations to screw with you?
What to stop them from scratching your car just to screw with you? People can hurt you and there is nothing you can do about it. Fortunately they choose not to most of the time.
> Absolutely not, the employer has advertised that they want to know about bad driving by placing the sticker on the vehicle and the employee has accepted that as part of their employment.
I meant when there is no such sticker. Even if the desire to know was not advertised, I believe it would be morally fine to report bad driving of a company vehicle to the entity liable for loss associated with the vehicle. As for the rest of your response, even though you pointed out a number of technical distinctions, I do not see a moral one.
> seems to fit the description of vigilantism . . .
Still no. Vigilante activity is by definition illegal, and this behavior is not.
You left off the last few words of my comment which stated that it met the definition as you had provided it.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vigilanteism
The definition as listed at reference.com is to simply take the law into ones own hands or without recourse to lawful procedures and doesn't include that it is unlawful or illegal in its own right. It seems pretty apparent that it can be argued this is attempting to punish individuals for unlawful actions "without recourse to lawful procedures."
The sex offender registry in the U.S. reports crimes to the public, and at best, it's nothing but a source of FUD ("Find the sex offenders on your block!"). At worst, it's a way of branding offenders for life, keeping them from holding even completely innocent jobs. Don't forget you can get put on the registry for something as trivial as urinating in public.
Give me any reason to believe this system will lead to a better end than the sex offender registry and I'll change my mind.
> for "life"
You mean for the duration of their stay in the registry.
> Give me any reason to believe this system will lead to a better end than the sex offender registry and I'll change my mind.
Ends are all well and good. But to me, a more important issue is that the public has a right to state facts about publicly committed acts in any forum they desire and which allows it. If people believe that it is beneficial to air their concerns about other people's driving in this forum, no tentative evaluation of the quality of the ends can be permitted to preempt that right.
As it is, there are too many drivers so unaware of road rules and best practices that they people driving correctly are the incompetents. This will fail to improve road safety, although it may succeed at raising insurance company revenue by providing an excuse to raise rates.
if licence == Philip_Inghelbrecht: pass
Generally, traffic citations and tickets are only reported to the DMV and insurance companies after someone has been convicted in court or paid a fine. There is almost always the ability to show up in court and contest the citation.
DriveMeCrazy seems to circumvent this due process.
They recognize they have 'noise' in their data. That noise is going to cost time and/or money to sort out if an innocent driver has their license plate entered by mistake or by some jilted/angry/petty person.
to be confronted with the witnesses against him;I really don't understand what you are so riled up about considering in another thread not five minutes ago you claimed that the police never charge anyone based on traffic violations reported by other citizens. As I recall, you had this on good authority from your friend in the NYPD.
And since the rates seem to be taken from thin air, they could raise your rates without you ever knowing that someone reported you.
I can't stand smokers that throw their (sometimes still lit) butts out the window. It would be nice to have some way to vent other than road rage.
- Your left brake light is out
- Thanks for being aware I was on a bicycle to your right and waiting before making that turn
- Nice RomRaider decal on the side of your WRX, is there an open-source ECU tuner's group in this city?
- I saw a black Mustang, license plate XXXX, clip the side of your parked vehicle and drive off.
Where did he say he's using the emergency line?
"the cops hate your friend"
you don't know this obviously
"I'd bet that they've never acted on a single one of his tips"
even if that were true, the cyclist is going to feel better so long as the probability of them acting sometime is positive. Think revenge lottery ticket. Humans don't process small probabilities well you might as well use it to feel better after getting cut off in the bike lane.
-actually I do, my friend is with the NYPD, and they hate people like that since they waste their time, they can't give you a ticket unless they've seen you break the law
-he said/she said doesn't apply to traffic tickets, so no, there is literally 0 chance of any positive result
Was involved in a hit and run, reported the guy right away, took them 2 hours to show up.
Had a tree fall on power lines, took them and the fire department 40 minutes to show up...granted there were no sparks flying. But still.
Had 2 accidents, first time had to wait for 4 hours for them to show up. The second time 30 minutes.
The point being, is that it takes a while for cops to actually act, and by the time they do, the guy you wasted precious time reporting, already left the jurisdiction
The cops have charged people my friend has reported.
Your friend is doing it right, the app is doing it wrong.
all this will do is overwhelm the resources of the DMV/insurance companies, costing them money, which they'll transfer to their customers.
and seriously, the only people who'd do this, would be someone who does 60mph in the left lane, while everyone else is doing 80. And in fact, the guy is the one who is breaking the law, since he is impending the flow of traffic.
i look forward to having 4chan track this guy down...snitches get stitches.
Reporting violations of the law is not the same as taking enforcement of the law into your own hands. The latter is vigilantism. The former is this app.
> all this will do is overwhelm the resources of the DMV/insurance companies, costing them money, which they'll transfer to their customers.
I don't buy the line of argument that insurance companies and the DMV are incapable of filtering their email, and that somehow this is going to cost significant enough amounts of money that consumers will be affected.
> and seriously, the only people who'd do this, would be someone who does 60mph in the left lane, while everyone else is doing 80. And in fact, the guy is the one who is breaking the law, since he is impending the flow of traffic.
Since we're going with juvenile arguments, I'll just say that when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
> i look forward to having 4chan track this guy down...snitches get stitches.
Jailhouse moral philosophy! Great finish.
-provided the email gets sent to spam@ its fine, otherwise, you'll still need to have customer service reps go through the list and hit delete.
-it's common knowledge that anyone going faster than you is a maniac, and anyone going slower than you is a moron.
-what can I say...the guy deserves it.
Gmail also allows filtering on the sender's address and subject patterns. I'm sure that the insurance companies have more sophisticated systems than this for routing CS requests. Think, please.
> it's common knowledge that anyone going faster than you is a maniac, and anyone going slower than you is a moron.
So you're of the position that there's no such thing as a bad driver and that anyone who says there is is just going too slow? Not a very well thought out or reality based position if you ask me.
> what can I say...the guy deserves it.
As do people who drive like jerks on the road. So I guess you and the author of this app have had a meeting of minds at last. It only took four comments.
Presumably if they are costing the company money and providing no benefit as you originally said, then they would. But, suppose they don't. What point are you trying to make here?
> [a bunch of stuff about speed laws]
I thought we were talking about an app that allows the reporting of unsafe driving. What do your views on the appropriateness of our speeding laws have to do with it?
How about high school kids? Piss of a popular kid and all his/her friends could start targeting your license plate.
This app has huge potential for misuse, and the fact that he's hoping insurance companies may use it for keeping track of customers is very scary indeed.
I guess the hacker community is just as susceptible to fear-mongering as the average Republican, because dozens of reasons not to be concerned about this are screaming out at me:
1. No one uses it yet.
1.1. We're not sure anyone ever will.
2. There is zero evidence that it will cause any harm.
3. There is zero evidence that, if it does cause harm, that harm will be irreparable.
4. There is at least some reason to believe that it might have good effects as well.
5. Many of the harmful things that people in this comment area are complaining about could already be accomplished through other means today. The actual increase in attack surface is essentially nil.
6. Many of the commenters, while complaining about vigilante justice, are also calling for vigilante justice against the app's author. On the one hand, turnabout is fair play. On the other hand, if you embrace this sort of vigilantism, why not embrace the sort the app's author is promoting? Also, have you no shame, you hypocrites?
If you think that this app is "very scary indeed," I really believe you need to work on your fear tolerance because there are things in the world worth being afraid of and this is not it.
forgot to turn on your headlights = usually other drivers will flash or quickly flip their lights on/off to warn you
gas cap = again, your responsibility.
Can he have this both ways?