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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I think it's unfortunate that this will snarl up pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users. At the same time: the relative lack of surveillance on drivers, especially industrial drivers, has always struck me as strange. There are very few things that are as disproportionately powerful and dangerous as a individual behind the wheel of a car; relative to the destruction that a distracted or impatient driver can cause, there's remarkably little surveillance that can support their victims in court.

(This is separate from this footage eventually being used to sell ads, as well as it being used non-consensually to "investigate" other crimes. I think Schneier is right to highlight concerns around the latter.)

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I agree, and if there were a privacy centric system I may be inclined to support it, however I think with cameras and surveillance it’s akin to give and inch, they take a mile.

We’re already down a dangerous path that isn’t really slowing down. Privacy in the digital age needs to be akin to no unlawful search and seizure.

But instead the ones at the top have us bickering against each other about more mundane issues, in the grand scheme of things

One's thoughts, communications, and reading habits are their private business. Behavior towards other users of public roads, not so much.

Agreed. An e-bike is limited to 25 km/h, but geofencing the top speed of cars is somehow not possible?

Basically all modern cars have electronic speed limiters, normally set to the speed rating of the originally equipped tires. Those bikes aren't geofenced either. Geofencing is hard because an official database doesn't exist, and cars can travel across thousands of jurisdictions.

Speeding is massively profitable for local governments. Most DC speed cameras make things much less safe by creating artificial bottlenecks on highways (there’s a 40 mph speed camera on I-66 which is 75 most of the country), but they put them in place based on projected revenue increases

I believe many Amazon delivery vans have always-on 360 cameras, as well as wifi scanners for location.

It's interesting they could have the most up to date mapping of anyone, I wonder if they plan to do anything with it.

"It's interesting they could have the most up to date mapping of anyone, I wonder if they plan to do anything with it."

No worries, Amazon has an excellent reputation, they would not think of doing shady things for money.

Aren't dashcams a form of a distributed surveillance system? Witnesses or victims of an accident often capture valuable evidence with dashcams of what happened

The comment above is talking about pedestrians and cyclists as well, who unfortunately have no option to have a "dashcam".

Bicycles can absolutely have dashcams, there are a few models on the market that attach to the rear because most collisions come from the rear. They have a built-in red light and can take continuous video and detect collisions.

Not strictly true; I, for one, don't hop on my bicycle without my helmet camera turned on.

if they have money they can buy a gopro; I've known many cyclists who list having the record of a potential accident as one of their reasons for buying and using a gopro.

I agree, but since we are effectively on an honor system for displaying valid, unobstructed plates and paying your tickets, more and more video-based accountability for driving behavior is a tax on conscientiousness that will make people feel like suckers and encourage them to defect.

What specifically do you want? Government cameras pointed at drivers?

Maybe: lots of cameras around with evidence available to discovery, but held by relatively many parties (dashcams, private vehicles, business owners) and without automated aggregation and processing of personal information.

I think we need to change the rule that it is legal to take anyone’s picture without asking. We need less cameras, not more.

Lots of cameras have been good at curbing lots of abuses.

Concentrated power with cameras-- one party controlling a lot of them, and doing automated aggregation of information-- has been bad for privacy.

Lots of cameras in public without the abuses of aggregating information seems best.

I’ll frame it in terms of outcomes: I don’t think any pedestrian or cyclist should be killed anonymously by a driver. I also don’t think drivers should feel empowered to casually disregard the laws of the road, as they currently do when they feel as if there are no consequences.

That doesn’t have to mean “government cameras”; I’m open to any solution that achieves those goals, including stricter licensing, urban redesign, harsher fines, etc.

When discussing populations, stating that a certain outcome should never happen isn’t reasonable. We need to look at the current rate and try to improve upon it.

You can replace “any” with “a vanishingly small number” if it makes the comment more palatable to you.

Trading noise for noise at the population level never works. I’m not sure where all of these anonymous hit and run fatalities are happening in any case. How would you possibly avoid 100% of those even if going full draconian?

Very slow Nerf cars.

This is so dystopian. Some people kill others and run.. but let's not let a few asshole justify draconian surveillance for everyone else. I may like to go faster than the speedlimit sometimes.. why should I give that up?

Pointed at cars, obviously.

There are many of those, in many formats, with many different behaviors. I'm not sure what lack of surveillance the OP is talking about.

But there does exist a high reluctance of transit rule enforcers to enforce transit rules, together with a high bias into looking only at the rules aimed at protecting the people inside the car, mostly at places where the car is creates the least risk to people outside of it.

Mandetory black box dash cams to qualify for insurance. Offline access only. A crash where dash cam is not recoverable is going to be one where the driver shouldn't walk away regardless.

that's a thing in trains, and may be a thing in airplanes.

I just heard China laughing across the Pacific just about now.

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