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California Mayors Demand Surveillance Cams On Crime-Ridden Highways (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: The 28 shootings along a 10-mile stretch of San Francisco-area highway over the past six months have led mayors of the adjacent cities to declare that these "murderous activities" have reached "crisis proportions." Four people have been killed and dozens injured. These five mayors want California Gov. Jerry Brown to fund surveillance cameras along all the on and off ramps of Interstate 80 and Highway 4 along the cities of El Cerrito, Hercules, Richmond, San Pablo, and Pinole.
Phase 1 and Phase 2 sound wonderful, when can they install them?
Phase 3 sounds like it's DoA. There's no marketing reason to know which road a driver of a certain road uses unless it's for generic city planning, in which case it's already done anyway. As for the rest of the important information, they have that already and can sell that whenever they want. Nothing scary from the cameras here.
No on the flip side I live in a country where there are automated are everywhere in the city and highway complete with license scanners. They don't get us for texting (yet) but they do a wonderful job of finding stolen vehicles, registration checks, insurance checks, environmental checks, and they monitor traffic continuously with great fidelity too, i.e. if someone has a flat and pulls over on the side of the highway to change his tire they automatically shutdown or speed limit the right most lane. We also get up to the minute traffic reports and very accurate predictions of how long a delay is should one arise.
The good outweighs your scary marketing scenario by a wide margin.