>The result? Minnesota isn't experiencing some sort of Mad Max like traffic apocalypses, things seem pretty normal and I don't know of any dramatic disparity between places that use such cameras and those who do not. Meanwhile corruption and other issues cloud the traffic camera world... it's a product that arguably encourages / benefits bad actors, and possibly nobody else despite what we might otherwise think it does.
There are so many areas of law and law enforcement that are like this. Turns out if you just let people do whatever most people will do what society considers reasonable because at scale what people do determines what society considers reasonable.
This is part of the core argument for libertarianism - and has been my experience in life. Generally every time I head someone should "there ought to be a law against that" there probably shouldn't be one without considerable thought on the matter.
Also, who is getting the value. With many public-private "partnerships" like this, it doesn't seem like the general public is getting value out of it; rather, it's the parties involved in making the business deal. The government can be wined-and-dined with sales pitches, and then pat themselves on the back for "making the public safer". The companies get a lucrative deal from the government.
Smart things, like these cameras, gives the companies that operate them a blackbox to work with that impacts the public but is not accessible to the public. So now, a company that has a vested interest in themselves, has the government go-ahead to cast a net to make money from the public. What a great deal, right?
Even if companies and government promise they won't do anything malicious or unjust, how can we actually trust their word when the ability for a company to skew things in their favor is such a low barrier?
If I ask a valet, "You won't joyride my car?", and they say, "No", how much of a guarantee is it that they won't joyride? Maybe they don't do anything obvious that would throw off a red flag, like significantly deplete the fuel or run up the odometer, but they decide to redline the car to hear it VROOM or drag race it in a short stretch of a street. These little 'nothings' add up over time, or at least give the incentives to get bigger and bolder over time if nobody notices.
Who is to say a company with smart things, like these cameras, wouldn't decrease the capture time by a few milliseconds on their highest revenue intersection, or release an "erroneous update" that lowers the red light capture tolerances?
It's better to be less trusting of these "smart" business dealings than to openly invite the possibility for abuse right through the door.
The camera flashed for both of their cars. Nice way to get punished for helping.
In Minnesota red light cameras and such automated ticketing systems were determined to be illegal (for the state):
https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/16/1688.asp
The result? Minnesota isn't experiencing some sort of Mad Max like traffic apocalypses, things seem pretty normal and I don't know of any dramatic disparity between places that use such cameras and those who do not. Meanwhile corruption and other issues cloud the traffic camera world... it's a product that arguably encourages / benefits bad actors, and possibly nobody else despite what we might otherwise think it does.
Sometimes despite what we might want, we just don't need smart stuff and using it just allows for bad actors and little else. There's lots of talk about home smart speakers but then on HN we see all sorts of discussions of people who bought them and admit, they really don't get a great deal of utility from them... so perhaps we've just paid for a product that actually provides google or amazon more utility than we ever get...
As Frank Herbert said:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
In Dune the result was that mankind eventually did away with "thinking machines" as it was clear the risk was greater than the reward.