Americans don’t love freedom, they love being special.

Yeah, we love our own freedom, not freedom for other people.

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.

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.

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.

I think this is common everywhere, but especially in the US there is the belief that there are "bad drivers" and "good. drivers" and so when speed cameras or anti-phone device catching someone that looks like them, it's obvious "collateral damage".

In my experience there are no good drivers, everyone gets distracted sometimes, and the myth of some uniquely "bad drivers" out there allows people to self justify their distracted driving because they aren't one of the out-group.