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Comment by tptacek

3 days ago

Which states are those? I'd like to read the statutes.

https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/automated-...

A friend entertained the idea of a startup focused on a social dashcam site, where users can upload clips of bad drivers tagged with their license plate number, and smart dashcams can alert to bad drivers in real time. They got as far as asking a lawyer before it fell apart.

  • Yikes. This smells a bit like Stasi-style surveillance. Unofficially encouraged by authorities. Rewards or social pressure or ideology turned a significant % of East Germans into Inoffizieller Mitarbeiters ("unofficial collaborators" or informants). Bad drivers today. And then ...

    • The point of the stasi collaborators was to undermine the targets personal relationships and isolate them because of the fear that they might be an informant.

      Publicly posting the behavior or unaffiliated parties is nothing like the stasi.

      2 replies →

  • I'm glad they did the research on this lol I thought about this a decade ago when I was doing a lot of driving and always thought it'd be something I'd explore. Good to know it's against the law

There's a nice list here with references to statutes: https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/automated-...

  • Just so we're clear, across all these statutes, the term "private" means "for private use". State and local governments can engage private firms to collect data in all of them.