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.
Since the article appears to be mostly a weird collection of badly referenced random cases, let me give you the primary source on the case in the headline:
https://www.tiktok.com/@kristakampz/video/7640403411845877012
Edit and also to save you having to go to tiktok, here’s a frame extracted from the video:
Note, this was in Alexandra Headland in Queensland in Australia. So no idea why the article cites Georgia law…
Also this is relevant: https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/mobile-phones
Illegal mobile phone use while driving includes:
- holding it in your hand
- resting on any part of your body (eg. your lap or shoulder)
If you hold your phone or have it on your body, you will be fined even if you’re not operating the phone, or it’s turned off.
AI …
that’s why it cites Georgia law.So no idea why the article cites Georgia law…
Because there was another case in Georgia in December that they were citing as well. In fact they cite several cases in different parts of the country. The article is making a case for a supreme court challenge to these Constitution violating cameras and fines. The Australian cases just a viral opener for the topic.
Can’t be that viral if the tiktok is already two months old. I think they are just too bad at journalism to check their sources.
Does a phone in the pocket count as resting on any part of the body?
Why is it illegal to have a phone in your lap? That doesn’t make sense. That’s bizarre.
Edit:
Really? This is a hot take? WTF!
I know in Western Australia, where I live, it is illegal to have the phone resting on any part of your body.
https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/road-safety-commission/mobile-phones-and-distractions
I wonder where the line is drawn between on your lap vs in your pocket. By that I mean, what if it is in a clear pouch on a lanyard around your neck, or in a running-armband. In both those cases it could still be used by need not have been touched while the car is driving.
Why is it illegal to have a phone in your lap?
Likely to make the law in any way practical to enforce. Many people will use their phone in the car by keeping it between their legs like a middle schooler hiding their phone use from their teacher. They can read messages or watch videos while keeping it out of their hands, but it’s still just as distracting.
You could just ban looking at a phone in your lap while driving, but then you have the nightmare of proving that someone who glanced down was actually looking at their phone, rather than just randomly glancing down for some other innocent reason. And they would have to glance down at their phone at the exact moment a camera or police officer saw them.
Phone use is actually very hard to enforce because of the nature of its use. People using their phone while driving don’t tend to continuously look at the phone the whole time they drive - they would be completely incapable of driving if they did so. Instead, they use it intermittently, such as while stopped at a traffic light or while cruising down the highway. That use is still enough to degrade their driving performance to the level of a drunk driver, but it’s not continuous. To make enforcement practical, you need to write the law so that it doesn’t require a lucky coincidence to enforce.
For an older comparable example, consider open container laws. You might reasonably ask, “wait, as long as I’m not drinking from it, why can’t I have an open beer in the car? Maybe I just want to take my half-finished beer home from the bar and finish it at home!” And while that would be a perfectly innocuous reason to have an open container of alcohol in the car, it would also make drunk driving laws much more difficult to enforce. You could only ticket someone for drinking in the car if they happen to take a sip right when you’re watching. Instead of trying to outlaw the infrequent action, you instead outlaw the necessary but continuous action. It’s not practical to only ban drinking in vehicles. Instead you ban having an open container, as “possessing an open container” is something a drunk driver will be doing for a protracted period of time.
It’s not a perfect approach to writing laws; you do end up criminalizing some innocuous behavior. But trade offs have to be made. Yes, it’s unfortunate that open container laws also make it so you can’t bring your half-finished drink home from the bar. And yes, it’s unfortunate that banning cell phone use while driving also requires banning just having a phone in your lap.
But if you’ve ever worked in a classroom, you’ll know that this is the only way to actually ban cell phone use while driving. Teachers learn very quickly they can’t just ban students from using their phones, they have to completely ban them from having them out at all. Relying on lucky coincidences to enforce laws is not a practical solution.
If you write enough laws in a manner that makes it easy to violate them accidentally, then anyone can be prosecuted at any time and civil liberties can be removed via technicalities.
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The only reason to have a phone in your lap while driving is if you intend to use said phone while driving.
Your phone fell off the dashboard phone stand, you caught it and set it in your lap.
Or you are currently using it and trying to be sneaky about it
That logic can be applied to anywhere in the car that the driver can reach. Is the Australian government suffering a collective stroke? Should we send help?
I honestly throw mine wherever without thinking about it. Def has been on lap or in crotch a few times.
A law that specified you were actively using the phone would be hard to enforce. Simmiliar to how it is usually illegal to have open alcohol within reach of the driver. The officer doesn’t have to actually see you drinking it.
How would it be hard to enforce? You can see it next their head.
Ever since video playback is possible. You no longer need to put your phone on your head to use it.
These are cargo cult laws. They don’t understand what the original laws were about. They just know “use phone in car bad” but they don’t know why. Used to you had to hold the phone to your head and block half of your vision.
Yes it does. Your phone is in your lap so you can look at it. Keep it away. I know everyone is addicted to them but just drive without looking st it.
I don’t own a car. I ride a bicycle and take Ubers and Lyfts for long distance travel, and smart phones are like the spice mélange to those drivers. They seem to need them to navigate the Universe. So this law just seems terribly ill-conceived. The lap is just an oddly specific place to focus on. So you can set them on the dashboard, center console, or anywhere else, but the lap is the danger zone?
My main phone is a dumb phone. I hate smart phones and only got one specifically for Ubder and Lyfts, so I’m not addicted. So I’m standing outside looking in and it’s a bizarre law. Sure, we don’t want people playing Angry Birds while driving, but I don’t think this is a well thought out solution that does anything at all except cause more chaos and suffering.
If you slam on the brakes or maybe brake too sudden and it flies off and onto the floor, then it could potentially slide under a pedal (like the brakes), hindering its function.
Is it likely? Probably not, but it is a dangerous hazard waiting to happen.
I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the logic of this law and this was one of the things I considered they must be worried about. It’s not so much people using them, it’s just they don’t want them in the lap. Because Uber and Lyft drivers have to use them for work in the US. Here they have they often have a mount on the dash board to hold their phone and they’re constantly taking calls and checking maps.
As you say though it’s like a one in a million event freak accident if it flies off the lap and gets stuck under the pedal. It would be weird to pass a law for some off the wall scenario like that.
An example of what people in positions of authority think is perfectly acceptable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District
School authorities surreptitiously and remotely activated webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home. After the suit was brought, the school district, of which the two high schools are part, revealed that it had secretly taken more than 66,000 images.
A lawsuit wasn’t enough, the administrators should be branded as sex offenders and the parents should have taken them out behind the school and beat the crap out of them.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Montgomery County District Attorney all initiated criminal investigations of the matter, which they combined and then closed because they did not find evidence “that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent”.
If I don’t have intent to commit a crime but I break the law, it’s not an excuse that a cop or judge will buy. Holy fuck.
I seem to recall something about a story where, like, a kids mom didnt know the camera was remotely turned on and walked through the room naked, after having just gotten out of the shower, and there was some kind of CPS investigation about it?
or is my brain mixing up several different school district voyeur stories together?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District
The school took 66,000 pictures of students in their bedrooms. School administrators should be listed as sex offenders but that doesn’t happen in the U.S. Case in point - our child rapist in chief.
Nope, that happened. If the institution spying on you in your home sees you naked, in your own home where you foolishly expect privacy, you’re a criminal.
Why did they even have the ability to do that in the first place? Holy fuck dude
Traffic cams violate our constitutional right to face our accuser in court.
Wouldn’t you just need a police officer to go to court and say they are accusing you based on said evidence and then you still face the accuser
The huge invasions of privacy seem like a much bigger issue but I am also not a legal expert
The police officer didn’t witness the crime. They’re making that Judgement based on evidence provided by a third party.
If my house were broken into, and I managed to capture video of the incident, I can’t just hand that to the police and call it a day. The accused has a constitutionally protected right to face me in court, not just the video or the officer I gave the video to, so that their defense can interrogate it fully. What if there is additional context that undermines the narrative presented by this single piece of evidence? If I know the accused and had a reason to see them convicted (such as getting a kickback from any fine they pay), now my clear evidence becomes a little more suspect. Now there’s a very clear motive for me to skew, misinterpret, or completely fabricate the video.
That’s what OP is referring to. If a company is going to install cameras and claim their cameras caught me doing something I shouldn’t have, I have a right to ask that company for more details regarding their claim. Ideally in a public court, with a representative of the company under oath.
Or more concisely: the government should never contract out law enforcement to private companies.
Have you ever fought a traffic ticket? You’re not on trial. You’re not pleading guilty/not-guilty. It’s an administrative/civil thing.
Every traffic ticket in the US I’ve seen requires you to check a box to plead before you pay it (assuming you aren’t fighting it). When you pay it, you are either pleading guilty or no contest. If you go to your court date instead you get asked to enter a plea and it can be not guilty.
Granted, I haven’t been ticketed in all 50 states… yet.
Edit: Apparently the click-bait headline is referencing a person from Australia, despite the rest of the article talking about US law… No idea how traffic tickets work there…
#lifegoals
To be clear I live in Texas so maybe we do things differently wherever you live. We definitely go to court and plead for traffic violations.
MA. Tickets have “I’d like to pay” or “I’d like a hearing”. No mention of guilt.
Hearings are civil, not criminal, and you represent yourself in front of a magistrate (baby judge). If you tried to represent yourself in a criminal case, the judge would give you a very hard time about that choice. Either way, you don’t call witnesses, there’s no cross examination, and no discovery.
I don’t get where people are going full Law&Order, demanding to see their accuser.
Traffic violations are rarely criminal cases.
It doesn’t violate constitutional rights as long as whatever the camera can detect/see would be the same as a police officer. If it has a license plate reader and face detection or whatever it’s unconstitutional because an officer probably wouldn’t have been able to issue a ticket if it were a person there instead of a camera. If it’s something like an obviously missing seatbelt or phone use seen through the window at a reasonable angle it’s constitutional.
I don’t understand the “face an accuser in court” argument. It’s a photo. You argue about the photo with the judge. The photo is your accuser.
No
The company sending the letter is the acccuser.
They need to explain how they interpreted the photo
Did you ever have a misunderstanding with someone that simply explaining it to each other cleared it up? How can a camera explain what it saw. The police officer wasn’t there and isn’t a witness. Also these cameras are not owned by the police. It’s a third party company that has a lease with them. So someone with no authority to make traffic stops is taking pictures of you and sending the bad stuff to police for money. Doesn’t that sound like a conflict of interest?
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Would be funny if it was a more modern vehicle, with a massive ipad that’s nearly bolted to your forehead and has displays on the back of every headrest.
For your safety.™
Great. Let me make sure my phone sits somewhere that hides it from view overhead when im not using it.
Ive been leaving my phone home more and more when I go places. I can’t wait until I get a citation for not having a phone.
Article:
Georgia law (OCGA 17-4-23) generally requires a traffic offense occur in the presence of an officer for a citation to be valid — raising direct legal questions about mail-in AI camera tickets.
Washington State caps automated camera fines at $145 under RCW 46.63.220 — far below what you might be paying too much when the viral ticket hits $1,251.
Five Albany, Georgia officers were criminally charged for misusing Flock plate-reader data for personal reasons, according to USA Today.
This was in Australia though
Find a flock employee and place its favorite pet around its house.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
One I got a $125 ticket for driving 27 near a school on a Saturday in Washington, so no system is perfect…
Wow, it sure must take a lot of processing power to go through that much surveillance data.
Remember kids, blackout or reflective tint and anti alpr film for ya plates are your friends.
Or… you don’t need a plate on a bicycle.
Agreed, which I wish I could but this place is the antithesis of anything in proximity. Maybe e bike but it’d have to be stealth because they’ll stop you on that shit too.
Got any recs for anti alpr film?
What about IR LED strips to flood the cameras with light?
Many youtubers have tried, It’s not reliable, doesn’t work in the day and newer cameras even in night vision are getting hard to swap.
The tint/reflective stuff has a decent chance of getting you an inspection ticket, most states don’t allow LP covers.
My best plan would be and LCD infused glass plate that you could blurr out with a button press like those electronic privacy windows. Thing is, even that’s illegal.
Maybe don’t be a dick in traffic?
Doesn’t seem to matter. This lady got a massive ticket without any evidence of anybody being bothered by her
They should take away her drivers license. A fine is not enough for so blatantly endangering everyone…
This is what I would say if she had actually looked down and not paid attention to traffic.
But this? This is just abusive use of technology
I mean, it would also be insane to take someone’s license away for actually using their phone at this point too. Newer cars have actual touchscreen tablet interfaces that requires the driver to look away from the road; sometimes even to see basic information like their current speed. Plus, there’s all these dickbags on the road in pickups or other light trucks (with or without those iPad screens) that are purposefully designed primarily to exude masculinity, not be safe vehicles to drive.
At this point, I don’t know how we argue that the phone thing is dangerous without the allowance of all that other shit contradicting that reasoning. Even worse, the existence of these infotainment systems in the cars themselves has probably resulted in charges laid against poorer people who drive older vehicles disproportionately while Keith is on his way to work at the landlord factory and watching Madagascar 3 on his speedometer.
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“Take cops out of the equation for traffic enforcement”
“NO, not like that!!!”
Correct… Not like that
“Law enforcement should be conducted specifically in the way that I imagine, not in the way that people vote for.”
- Someone speaking unironically, believe it or not.
ACAB. This isn’t the place to try to garner sympathy for your threats against society from the ruling class, traitor.
I’m just glad the Lemmy devs didn’t set a maximum block limit so I don’t have to pick and choose which bad-faith attackers like yourself I block.
Alternate viewpoint, it’s not about doing it a specific person’s “way” but more about not doing it the objectively stupid way.
One person’s opinion is another person’s “objectively stupid.”
I have yet to see a reasonable proposition on how to do traffic enforcement that seems to sit right with the vast majority of people.
My point in making the above joke(s) is that this is the alternative that many people cried out for. It feels like goal-post moving when every way to enforce the law is “but not this way, a different way.”
My guess at the common denominator that cannot possibly be objectively confirmed is that people simply don’t want to be met with consequences for breaking the law, and no matter how that’s done it will be rejected.
In other words, every way to enforce traffic has downsides - every single one. This is the one that does not involve cops. As you see, this is the downside. It’s laughably easy to “THIS IS BAD” at it while proposing no alternatives, and very amusing when an alternative (like this one) is eventually picked apart for being “objectively stupid” when its downsides inevitably crop up.
I dunno man you come off as pretty objectively stupid, but whatever
Nice cop-out!
If it makes you feel better I feel the same way about you, given you appear to be in love with ad hominem.
3/3 of your comments were intellectually lazy, 2/3 were ad hominem. Do you ever contribute anything meaningful or am I good to block you?
Edit:
Wait, why wait for your answer? Someone doing an ad hominem multiple times in a row is obviously not worth chatting with further. Seeya!
It wasn’t even in her hands or at the very least distracting her and they still send a ticket? Lmao
I misread this at first and thought her head was down looking at her phone and I was like, “yeah she deserves a ticket but that doesn’t make the surveillance state good” but you’re right: she wasn’t even looking at her phone! This is fucking dystopian
The moments I had my phone, face down and on my lap or between my legs, were the moments I had used it on traffic while at a stop light and had to go before I was done.
I see this as a valid charge.
The amount is a little bit extreme but still valid.
I would be mad af but couldnt argue against it.
Holy based
i keep mine in the space between the console and the seat not quite resting on my leg just sitting there unused and charging. the case on it kinda keeps it from looking like a phone as well
