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Traffic Camera Captures Woman Driving With Her Phone on Her Lap (Face Down), The State Mailed Her a $1251 'Public Safety' Ticket (www.gadgetreview.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A woman drives with both hands on the wheel. Her phone sits face-down on her lap. No officer pulls her over. No lights flash. Weeks later, a $1,251 ticket arrives in the mail. The evidence: a single frame from a Camera surveillance app. The charge: phone use while driving.

Automated camera companies market their devices as automated license plate readers — tools for catching stolen cars, flagging warrants, and aiding serious investigations.

Sold as a Crime Tool. Used as a Fine Machine.

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[–] 5 points 1 month ago (11 children)

This has nothing to do with Flock, these cameras catch people who are breaking a law and don't store/index footage otherwise, Flock is purely survailance tech, even if you do nothing wrong the point of flock is to survail.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (10 children)

    and don't store/index footage otherwise

    How do they manage that, with the current surveillance regime? Is all the image processing on device? What's it sampling against? How does it send the tickets? One-way infrared flashes?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (9 children)

    I could be wrong but pre-Flock and letting the tech-Bros actually build a survailance state, most traffic cameras were designed to only flash when they caught someone breaking the law and so only send data off the device when needed.

    How do they manage that

    For speed/red light cameras it's trivial, for something like this it's pretty easy to process on device to detect a phone in your hand/lap, but probably does need someone to check for false positives.

    Is all the image processing on device?

    It should be, this is simple to do on device (unless it's outsourced to Palantir & frens)

    How does it send the tickets

    Obviously when it triggers it uploads data.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    it uploads data

    ... So. To the internet?

    simple to do on device

    Image recognition is not computationally cheap. There are more and less expensive ways to do it, but the absolute floor of it turns your phone into a hot plate. So whatever's in there would need to be at least a phone chip.

    someone needs to check

    So it is kept and stored.

    pre all-this-shit

    Red light/speed cams, triggered on motion sensor boolean when light red or radar speed reading>x.

    You don't know what the hell you're talking about, which is fine, but why are you speaking confidently and assuming such good will about proven constant brazen liars saying they're not doing the shit they literally always do?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (7 children)

    You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about

    Lmao.

    You can literally detect phones with a raspberryPi the idea that you need to upload it to a server is ridiculous.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

    You can 'detect phones' via anything with WiFi. Are you trolling? Do you not understand the difference between image processing and simpler more computer readable signals?

    You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. How are so many people so rabidly and confidently ignorant?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

    OpenCV is more than capable of detecting a phone AND can easily be run on a PI with a frame rate high enough for traffic monitoring.

    How are so many people so rabidly and confidently ignorant?

    I dunno man, what made you that way?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (4 children)

    Do you understand what a pi is?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    Is an SBC with miniscule processing power, far less than a dedicated phone detection camera would have.

    How does that help you dig you're way out of this hole you've dug by claiming it's impossible to locally process images?

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  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    No. You're thinking of an arduino. Or one of the company's lines of microcontrollers, which isn't what people mean when they say 'a pi'.

    A raspberry pi is basically a phone equivalent. Different architecture, but same magnitude of flops. The versions with enough ram cost about aw much as a phone and don't come with storage or power cable. Both of which you would need, so add an m.2 drive for the referents.

    And a box fan under it and a copper brick to glue to the CPU, maybe another for the RAM, because its gonna get hot.

    But you don't know what any of those words mean, and don't understand that other sensors exist. But like if you did understand any of what I said; you'd feel mortified as fuck right now.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Dude WTF are you on about? I've run openCV on Pi-zeros.

    I think you need to lay of the Rich & Morty, it's clearly causing you brain damage.

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