I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Their privacy policy states they share personally identifiable information with third parties only with consent. Their entire business model is the exact opposite. They reason the site and app exists is to share personally identifiable information with third parties without consent.
Good point on vigilantism, but I think it's more than that. This whole scheme smacks of grade school tattle-tailing with the worst of everything about red-light cameras. You can't face your accuser, and there's no frazzled teacher who you can tell your side of the story to defend yourself with.
It's a seriously flawed system and I hope no insurance companies adopt it.
Yes, but school ground bullies don't kill thousands of people per year, unlike bad drivers.
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.
If another driver around you is breaking a law dial 911 if it's an emergency (drunken driving) or the non emergency number if it's small (littering). In the first case you should let the police deal with it and in the second you need to be able to positively identify the driver and be willing to show up in court. You can do this today and don't need to have an iphone app that bypasses legal channels and the the other drivers right to due process.
I assume they mean the private personal information of the _user_, which is different than the PII of the target.
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.
Crimes should be reported to the police, not the public. A public report of a crime is a punishment (see the Biblical story of Cain, public markings for adultery in colonial New England, etc.).
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.
The problem with the sex offender registry is that its implied claim ("this person has at some time in the past committed a crime that would lead us to believe they are a sexual danger to others") is often false. That is, the actual crime would not lead a reasonable person to believe that the offender present a danger to them. In the event that it were always true or the burdens added by the label were always justified, there would be no wrong in reporting it to the public.
> 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.
How is reporting a supposed violation to someones insurance company or the dmv for the purpose or raising their rates without law enforcement involvement or due process being available for the other driver not vigilantism?
For one thing, vigilantism itself describes illegal enforcement of the law. This is not illegal. On another level, vigilantism need not be exactly but does tend to invoke an image of physical force used in the punishing of crimes. Finally, as a technical matter, the reporter of the violation is not enforcing a law against someone, just legally transmitting information about the person's behavior. Vigilantism involves the enforcement of laws against the victim.
If the intention of sending this information to the DMV and insurance companies rather than law enforcement is designed to effect enforcement of the law via a rise in insurance rates for the offender without involving law enforcement or due process then that would seem to meet the definition of vigilantism you have provided.
I guess I just don't believe the legal transmission of factual information can ever properly be labeled "vigilantism," especially when its recipient is a legal authority or someone who might be liable for the bad behavior reported. Is informing an employer of an employee's unsafe driving vigilantism? Because the actors in that case have analogous financial and moral roles as the ones in this.
> ... legal transmission of factual information...
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.
> 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
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.
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."
I would be willing to bet that most people who use the app to flag other drivers are themselves worse than average drivers. Does the app send flagger's info to the insurance company as well as the flagee's info?
Very few of them are likely to have launched the app prior to getting in the car as well. So even with the voice entry of the license plate (how accurate is that going to be) you'll still have to get the app open, then pay attention to whatever prompts it gives you before submitting to make sure you are reporting the right license plate. This seems like a horrible app and very distracting.
If, instead of reporting drivers to the DMV and their insurance companies this sent a message to a mailbox accessible by the driver, it would be pretty cool.
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.
Ah, that's an interesting point. And not just 4chan. Imagine if someone posts your license # along with some rant about how you were a jerk to Reddit or Digg. Let the mass flagging begin! This already happens with polls, or yelp or whatnot. Even if you were in the wrong, you could get punished way out of proportion.
I think there is already nothing to prevent that. A single 4chan insider -- every insurance company probably has at least one -- could wreck your rates. They could probably also figure out how to send forged police reports to the insurance companies if they wished.
There are processes in place already to keep one accountable while driving. We can debate the effectiveness or lack thereof, but this is not the solution.
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.
This right only applies to a citizen charged with a crime in a court of law. It doesn't give you the right to know what people were saying about you behind your back at the water cooler, or know which people are complaining about how you cut them off using this app.
when you speed you break the law, which is why you have the right to go to court to fight a ticket. If I get charged with speeding, and get 4 points on my license because some asshat thought I was speeding then I should have the right to cross examine the guy who reported me in court, like I can do with cops.
You seem to be confused. There is no reason to believe the police will charge you based on an anonymous comment from a user of this app. If they did, I am sure he would be called to the witness stand if you decided to contest the charge. But honestly I cannot see this happening at all.
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.
my problem isn't with the DMV aspect, since they can't do anything with it....my problem is with the insurance companies, who might just decide to factor this into their rate calculations.
And since the rates seem to be taken from thin air, they could raise your rates without you ever knowing that someone reported you.
Is it just me but, even though the information is sent to the DMV and insurance companies, it's completely unenforceable? How is this any different then me just calling your insurance company (assuming I have this knowledge) and saying 'Hey, this guy was driving like a tool on such-and-such a date'. What proof is there? If my insurance company or the DMV did anything with any of these reports against me, I would immediately challenge the veracity of the data.
While, I don't really like that these "offenses" are stored permanently, I would like a way to anonymously notify a driver they're doing something wrong.
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.
I have a friend who writes down license plates on his bicycle commute, and phones them in to the cops regularly. This app is no different from that. You should have no expectation of anonymity when driving a multi-ton vehicle on public property at speeds that can kill people.
This is VERY different than what your friend is doing. Your friend is reporting these drivers to law enforcement and allowing them to deal with it, and/or allowing your friend to appear before the people he's accusing in court for the purposes of issuing and enforcing a citation in regards to a violation of the law ensuring due process. This app reports directly to the DMV and insurance companies according to the article.
Your friend is doing it right, the app is doing it wrong.
so your friend ties up the 911 line over some petty bullshit like someone doing +5mph? Just fyi, the cops hate your friend, and I'd bet that they've never acted on a single one of his tips
"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.
-because the sort of guy to report people as often as was implied in the original post, is the sort of guy who uses 911.
-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
that's an old wives tale, ever called the cops yourself? I did.
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
reporting to the DMV and the insurance companies is over the top...those 2 entities specifically ignore vigilantism and your record can only be affected if a police officer who actually knows the law issues a citation.
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.
> those 2 entities specifically ignore vigilantism
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.
Speaking of 4chan. This app could be their next uber prank. All they need to know is David Miscavige's license plate number, and I bet hundreds of Anonymous people will be targeting him all over California.
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.
> 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.
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.
-who says they'd want to filter them out completely?
-i'm in the position, that our speed laws are outdated. Cars are now much more stable at speeds. Hell you can go 140mph in a M3 without actually feeling it. Hell it doesn't even have to be a M3...you can do 120mph in a civic just fine. There's actually been studies done that show that lower speed limits actually end up causing more accidents. No, I'm not advocating for 120mph speed limits, but 80mph is perfectly safe for any car.
-There is a huge difference between someone going 80-90 in the fast lane, and the guy doing 80-90 passing people on the shoulder.
> who says they'd want to filter them out completely?
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?
The whole point of having a license plate (or "tag") on your car is to make you accountable. Any anonymity drivers may have had up till now has been entirely incidental. You are responsible for your driving, and you always have been since you got your state-issued license.
The license plate makes the vehicle's owner accountable, mainly to ensure that the vehicle is fit to drive. But it doesn't identify the driver. I'd hate to see my insurance rates go up due to this app because I lent my car to a friend, or because someone behind us got aggravated when the car stalled while I was teaching my daughter to drive.
I can't see how this [reporting flagged subjects to dmv and insurance companies] is going to work. First of all they need a proof of violation that would be difficult to obtain. Also this company will get sued by flagged users into oblivion for violation of privacy.
Awesome monetization idea though.
Not all bad: It's be cool if someone would report to me when my tail lights are out. Or that I forgot to turn my headlights on. Or if my gas cap is hanging out.
This is nothing but vigilantism.