The article is about the US
The headline is about an event that took place in Australia. The article is just a crap one all around.
Holy shit that’s bad. The headline actually made me suspect that, because that’s exactly the cost of the fine here in Qld and I knew it was at least very close. But I clicked the article and it seemed to say it was about somewhere in America. I actually read the article and came away less informed than I started.
The law. It’s a legal requirement. I don’t have an insane paranoia.
Or decrease the need for cars in the first place with public transport
And road diets, and modal filters, and bike infrastructure that is wide, separated, given priority at intersections, and ubiquitous. All great ideas I fully support. But even given immense political will those will take decades to fully deliver.
Meanwhile in a country a 10th the population of America 100s of people die every year because of drivers on phones. For a measure to be effective as a preventative, people need to believe there’s a high chance they will actually get caught. That’s the most effective predictor. These should not be secretly installed, but accompanied with a public campaign making it clear that they are being installed and that being caught is very likely.
And people who are caught, more than just a fine, need to face a real chance of losing their licence. Not to be punitive, but because that is what they have demonstrated is necessary for genuine public safety because they are dangerous if they’re allowed to drive.
Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin’ in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you’re yellin’? “That’s not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first.” You’re too late.
— Bill Gates in the docudrama Pirates of Silicon Valley
I have heard bad things about how Flock works in particular with respect to tracking people, abuse of police powers, etc. But it was not involved in the event in this article, and it is not the only way of doing mobile phone detection.
My state uses a company called Acusensus, which only captures images for long enough to run the AI over them and then deletes all those without even being seen by a human if no offence is detected, among other privacy safeguards. The humans who do review the ones that AI detects as an offence don’t even get to see where or when the alleged offence took place.
Who says how long the data is being kept and where it’s going?
The government says. They’re the ones operating the cameras. Absolutely, they should not be used for any other purpose than their stated one. No video saved, only still frames kept long enough for the AI to make a determination, and kept longer if that determination is that there was a phone detected, so the photo can be used as evidence.
But in that situation, where the government is operating it in accordance with security and privacy best practice, the safety benefits far outweigh any theoretical downsides. This is not some theoretical. Over 1000 people die every year in Australia on our roads. Approximately 16% of serious car crashes are linked to mobile phone use.
We need to stop treating driving like a sacred right, and start treating it like what it is: an incredibly dangerous activity in need of heavy regulation.
slightly lower profile than a Ford Maverick
Just looking at the Maverick online, it seems a fairly obscenely tall bonnet in the 2022 models, but older models are much more reasonable.
ionique? Ionic
I think it’s spelt Ioniq. They’re a brand I quite like, and looking at their recent lineup (I think the last time I looked at them was like 2021), the Ioniq 3, 5, and 7 all seem really good. The 9 stretches things a bit, but is still a hell of a lot better than the Maverick 2022.
Sure, and I’ll agree with them on those points.
But Americans tend to be the most likely to take things a step too far. Opposing speeding cameras, red light cameras, and phone use cameras is not the same as those things. These are all dangerous but normalised behaviours that should be cracked down on for genuine public safety.
Yup. I’m not surprised at Americans being opposed to it, but here in Australia we have cameras that detect phone usage while driving. The fine itself is issued after a person verifies the photo. And I am fully supportive of it. Driving a motor vehicle is an insanely fucking dangerous task. If your full attention isn’t on it, you deserve to receive a fine. Keep the phone stowed securely in a holder, or away in your pocket.
The freedom of me to be able to make my trip on foot or bike—or even in my own car—without being killed by you far outweighs any idea of freedom you might have to be able to have your phone on your lap.
Australians and Canadians have some pretty bad entitlement when it comes to driving. But neither of us are anywhere near as entitled as Americans. Discussions like the one in this thread make that very clear. !fuckcars@lemmy.world
That’s an insane interpretation of the law. I don’t know or even care what prior jurisprudence says on the matter, it’s fucking dumb if it’s been interpreted that way.
If the camera took the photo and automatically issued the fine, then sure, I agree. But the camera should be taking the photo and passing it to a human to decide if a fine is warranted or not. And in that case, the human (or more to the point, the organisation the human works for) is the accuser. And the fine should stand, unless a defence explaining how the photo misrepresented the situation can be successfully mounted (similar to how a defence could be mounted explaining that the speed camera was incorrectly calibrated).
I’m not being prejudgmental, I’m asking a question, and explaining the reason the question is relevant.
So is it gonna go back to being the USDS and doing the good work that organisation did? Or is it just dead?
You bought yours before 2018? Because that’s the cut-off for when supporting anything Musk does was acceptable. Butting his way into an emergency situation offering “help” that lacked any awareness of what was actually needed, and getting so butthurt when told he wasn’t helping that he accused the heroes actually saving children’s lives of being paedophiles, and hiring PIs to try and track down dirt on them to that effect, is inexcusable. And then lying to a court to pretend that calling someone a paedophile is not a serious insult in South Africa, in order to win the defamation suit.
It was a prominent enough news event that unlike his many flaws from before then, Tesla owners cannot reasonably claim ignorance after 2018.
But anyone who genuinely did buy their Tesla before then is fine in my books. As winkerjadams says, selling your car now won’t hurt them. Not enough to matter, anyway. (In theory, more people selling might reduce the resale value, which will reduce incentive for people to buy new, reducing Tesla’s value. But I suspect that’s a miniscule effect in the EV market.)
slate truck, but I’m sure it’s bad for leftists someway somehow
I’m not familiar with it. But what’s its front-on visibility like? How many children can sit in a line in front of it before you can see them? How tall would someone have to be before a crash results in someone being knocked over the car, rather than being run over? (The former being generally much safer.) The problem with many of these types of vehicles that Americans call “trucks” is that their insanely tall bonnets make them insanely dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists—especially children.
Perhaps worth noting that, IIRC, in Australia the law strictly prohibits these age verification processes from requiring ID.
I think the porn age-verification hooks off of the same law, passed a year or so earlier than the porn age-verification law, as the social media age-verification law. And I know that that law requires that they have some other means of verifying age. Some social media sites have simply used the age and/or content of the account to bypass the need for any verification that requires explicit user action. But for others, things like AI-based face age-detection have been used. They’re allowed to offer ID verification as an option, but it cannot be their only means.
This is not meant as a defence of the law, btw. It’s still crap. Just a clarification of one noteworthy difference between our law and the one in, say, Texas.
(Edit: just because it amuses me, I wish to clarify that by “our” I mean the whole of Australia; and by “Texas”, I mean Texas, USA, and not Texas, Qld.)
Someone has. Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. Unfortunately, SCOTUS held 6–3 that they “only incidentally burdened the protected speech of adults”, which meant that because they decided only intermediate scrutiny applied (as opposed to the more difficult burden of strict scrutiny, or the even weaker burden of rational basis), the law was ok.
although I’m sure that’s on the Republican shit-can list
Well even back in 2004 when Ashcroft v ACLU was decided (and protected online porn as free speech), Justice Scalia said “no, porn should not in any way be protected”, and three other justices said whatever restrictions on it were in the law being adjudicated were acceptable as a way to protect children. SCOTUS’s more recent decisions regarding hard age-verification in cases like Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton has held that strict age-verification laws are allowed.
I had a similar response at first, but I believe Zen is responding to Zahill’s comparison to America. In America, yes. Their first amendment is very, very broad. Over time, various cases have held that “obscene” material can be banned, but they have increasingly narrowed the definition of obscene to the point that most of what we would call porn is now legally protected. Cases like Roth and Miller, earlier on. Leading up to, more recently, Ashcroft v ACLU which prohibited bans of online porn pretty much entirely.
(Disclaimer: this comment comes from some vaguely remembered YouTube videos from Legal Eagle, plus skimming the Wikipedia articles of the cases mentioned. I’m probably being overly broad…or overly narrow, in some way here.)
Here’s my thought experiment: nothing changes.
I have literally never used it. I have one very simple rule for chat apps that I hold to over everything else. The user identifier must be a username or email address. It must absolutely not be a phone number or something else that intrinsically ties it to a specific device. What’s App has failed that test since before Facebook bought it. In a world where we have multiple devices and move between them often, it has always been insane to me that other people don’t think there’s a problem with using a phone number as a unique identifier for an individual. And it only gets even worse when you start adding international travel, changing your phone number, etc. into the mix.