It's very much like the invention of the concept of jaywalking. An organized effort to shift blame/responsibility.
It's a crime from a criminal to scam the bank. Instead of the bank being held accountable for mistaking the identity (or don't do enough due diligent), the concept shifts the blame to the account owner, saying it's their fault for having their identity "stolen", despite them was not involved in the scam process.
An individual couldn’t pull that in any other transaction.
To add:
“They knew your mom’s maiden name!”
And now for some reason using an SMS as verification is the standard. (And often required).
So then we bolt-on these solutions to try to get it to work. The issue is we have multiple costs here - we have to balance security, but we also need to make sure customers can get their money most of the time they need to.
I recently signed up for Apple Enhanced Data Security or whatever it was called. It made it very clear that if I lose my password, my data can never be recovered. Ever. No email address can help, no recovery mechanisms. It's sealed and done for good. I'm tech-savvy and I can live with this. Can Nana? For my money, no.
We do things like security questions because they're easy and people understand them, and people use them all the time to recover accounts. Same reason we do SMS - everyone has a phone. These are imperfect solutions because perfect solutions have other issues. How many people will be locked permanently out of their bank account? How will the bank deal with those lawsuits?
A good resource for anyone dealing with credit issues due to identity theft. If I recall correctly, the advice boils down to notifying the bank that the transaction was fraudulent and then notifying credit unions that the bank has been notified that the transaction is fraudulent. Of course, doing all this through proper channels. It’s still bullshit how banks sabotaged public knowledge of it but at least the law favors the consumer.
That seems like a very odd view to me. The article points out the rising tide of traffic accidents that led to these laws being passed. As automobiles became ubiquitous it was more and more dangerous for pedestrians to walk on roads. So the laws followed this. That auto companies were involved in the lobbying process is a non-factor; even if we had increased criminal liability for traffic fatalities, the fundamental problem is that law is downstream of culture, and that we would reach a breaking point where juries would simply not convict drivers, as it became more and more common wisdom to be wary of automobiles when crossing streets.
No grand conspiracy is necessary here, this is just technology changing society and laws adapting to that reality.
I practically guarantee that for each idea you will be able to find a municipality that tried it and found that it didn't work for what in retrospect were very obvious reasons.
The fact of the matter is that society was changing, and that was it. Places where cars go are not compatible with places that people go and cars were getting cheaper and more common and more necessary all the time.
Really? Because the humanity's track record about anything that's brand new is horrible. Lead in gasoline? Seems to help a lot with engine function, let's deploy it planet-wide before making sure it's safe. Nothing can possibly go wrong!
> what are some ways that the laws could have evolved in this direction?
As for laws themselves, in the event of a driver hitting a pedestrian, the driver is found automatically at fault. If it turns out the pedestrian was at fault, the driver still remains liable for 50% of the damages. (Suprised? Think, which party is the source of the danger? Can the pedestrian ever harm the driver in any way? Then how can the responsibility ever not lay on the driver?)
But really, it's not laws that are needed here, but well designed infrastructure. Infrastructure that clearly communicates to everyone how to behave.
Speed limits are a great example. How exactly is putting up a sign saying "pls no speederino" supposed to affect a vehicle moving at 100mph through a residental street? Is the threat of potential consequences down the line in the unlikely scenario of getting caught supposed to do that? That'd require humans to be rational actors.
Now, if we put a bump on the road that will damage the vehicle if gone over at speeds of >50mph, then the speedster has only two choices: 1) go over it and immediately feel the consequences 2) slow down.
Some other such measures:
- raised crosswalks (The crosswalk simply continues, it's the road surface that comes up. That way it's the vehicle that intrudes on the space of the pedestrians, not the other way around. Note that this is the opposite of how it's almost always done.)
- roundabouts
- narrowing roads
- curb extensions
- chicanes
- changing the road surface to be less pleasant to drive on at speed
- adding and increasing curves in general
Prior to the invention of the automobile, if a pedestrian walked onto a public street and was struck and killed by a vehicle, the pedestrian was 100% at fault unless the driver was negligent. Merely operating a vehicle in a normal manner was not negligence.
It has been understood since the construction of Pompeii at the latest, that pedestrians belong on sidewalks and vehicles in the road.
Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris was built in the 1600s with sidewalks.
All of the oldest photos from the 1800s of major cities show a separation of vehicles and pedestrians.
If you have access to a newspaper archive like I do you can run a search for jaywalking and sort by oldest result.
Most of the pushback to jaywalking laws was because they required crossing at corners, not the middle of the street.
People instinctively (wrongly) believed that crossing in the middle was safer. Statisticians know that corners are safer.
Fun fact: you were more likely to die being run over by a horse in New York City prior to the invention of the automobile than you are to be struck and killed by an automobile today.
Much MUCH more likely.
>Horses killed in other, more direct ways as well. As difficult as it may be to believe given their low speeds, horse-drawn vehicles were far deadlier than their modern counterparts. In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003; given the modern city’s greater population, this means the fatality rate per capita in the horse era was roughly 75 percent higher than today. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city’s fatality rate per auto in 1997.
https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/20...
344 is a lot. In 2024, there were 252 auto-related fatalities (drivers, occupants, cyclists, and pedestrians) in NYC.
I once saw an article that in the 1800s there were over 150 fatalities per year in San Francisco due to street cars alone so I wager the increasing value of human life in the early 1900s also contributed to jaywalking laws.
Everyone just used to accept people dying left and right due to horses and trains.
But again, it WAS NOT a conspiracy to steal the streets from pedestrians.
I refuse to believe this without attribution. Sure, "jaywalking" might be more dangerous than crossing at corners, but I'm highly confident that controlled zebra crossings in the middle of the street are safer.