Wikinomics reports in a post titled Trapster: Faster than a Speeding Cell Phone? on a mobile application that works across a wide range of platforms to alert users as they approach a speed trap. The detailed description of the device and its possibilities ends with these interesting questions:
Police radar detectors such as those made by Cobra or Uniden are illegal in Canada but if the Trapster application becomes popular enough to render police traps futile - will the application become illegal too? How can such a law be enforced?
Comments
@ 18:39
Since this speed trap data is not unlike any other data it can be packaged as a feed…there will be little way to police this….well not successfully.
I wrote about this very thing (social motor net), in a somewhat odd manner, some time ago::
http://futureprogress.net/-/2006/03/02/the-future-of-speeding-and-the-social-motor-net/
@ 08:45
The data, however, is open to compromise, which I wrote about at http://randykolb.com/?p=18 , specifically, that purposely false data could be entered by certain local law jurisdictions. Would this happen? Probably not in most circumstances. But if a particular jurisdiction was bent on bringing the system down, maybe at a county or state level, they could perhaps even outsource erroneous data entry. Again, not likely but certainly a possibility.