It's a seriously flawed system and I hope no insurance companies adopt it.
And compared to some of the predictors that insurance companies currently use (age, sex, income, marital status), number of complaints seems like a much better predictor to me.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who uses this app should probably have their insurance raised much more than any individual drivers who are reported.
Also I feel I must again correct this misconception that mere reporting of violations of the law is somehow equivalent to unauthorized meting out of punishment for lawbreaking. Vigilantism and reporting crimes are two different things.
The sex offender registry in the U.S. reports crimes to the public, and at best, it's nothing but a source of FUD ("Find the sex offenders on your block!"). At worst, it's a way of branding offenders for life, keeping them from holding even completely innocent jobs. Don't forget you can get put on the registry for something as trivial as urinating in public.
Give me any reason to believe this system will lead to a better end than the sex offender registry and I'll change my mind.
> for "life"
You mean for the duration of their stay in the registry.
> Give me any reason to believe this system will lead to a better end than the sex offender registry and I'll change my mind.
Ends are all well and good. But to me, a more important issue is that the public has a right to state facts about publicly committed acts in any forum they desire and which allows it. If people believe that it is beneficial to air their concerns about other people's driving in this forum, no tentative evaluation of the quality of the ends can be permitted to preempt that right.
I would be willing to bet that you'd be very hard pressed to prove that the majority of the reports in a system like this actually contain factual information. When you report a traffic violation to law enforcement they are going to either investigate themselves or expect you to be able to positively identify the driver and show up in court. This gives the other driver the ability to defend themselves as well as forcing you to prove your statement. None of those requirements exist in the system described.
> ... especially when its recipient is a legal authority...
The DMV is not a legal authority for processing traffic violations. Law enforcement and the courts are. The DMV will provide that information to the insurance company after any fines are paid or court decisions are rendered but they are not the legal authority.
> ... someone who might be liable for the bad behavior reported
The insurance companies would probably love to get reports about bad behavior of their drivers so that they could more aggressively adjust rates however they would still have to deal with the fact that there's really no way to prove that any of these complaints are legitimate. What's to stop your ex girlfriend and her six friends from each reporting you over the course of a month or two for traffic violations to screw with you? How does this application or your insurance company filter that information out? Going off of actual cited/fined traffic violations seems to be a much more secure accounting method.
> Is informing an employer of an employee's unsafe driving vigilantism?
Absolutely not, the employer has advertised that they want to know about bad driving by placing the sticker on the vehicle and the employee has accepted that as part of their employment. The driver of that vehicle however is not absolved of any legal responsibility by also being accountable to their employer, that is a separate deal. You have no obligation to report bad drivers to their employers and may instead go straight to law enforcement. One of the benefits of those programs is to keep law enforcement from becoming involved in the first place and can be considered liability mitigation. This is not the same as side stepping law enforcement and going straight to the insurance company of a driver, in fact this application would be like skipping the employer and reporting the driver to the employers liability insurer for the report.
> Because the actors in that case have analogous financial and moral roles as the ones in this.
The employer and the insurance company have analogous financial and moral roles however they have no authority to enforce traffic laws. Employers have an incentive for you to bypass law enforcement, other drivers on the road don't.
There is already a legal process for dealing with these issues and an application that goes around them to mete out punishment seems to fit the description of vigilantism as you've provided it.
In the US, where I live, you can make legally make reputation-damaging accusations without proving them to be true. Only in cases where the accusations can be proven false is making such an accusation illegal. Personally I think that's a fine system and would be sufficient to keep people mostly honest when reporting others using this app. There is not a whole lot of reason to use a traffic app to try and harm someone when so many more direct means are available.
> The DMV will provide that information to the insurance company after any fines are paid or court decisions are rendered but they are not the legal authority.
Then I imagine they will just discard the reports, and no harm has been done.
> What's to stop your ex girlfriend and her six friends from each reporting you over the course of a month or two for traffic violations to screw with you?
What to stop them from scratching your car just to screw with you? People can hurt you and there is nothing you can do about it. Fortunately they choose not to most of the time.
> Absolutely not, the employer has advertised that they want to know about bad driving by placing the sticker on the vehicle and the employee has accepted that as part of their employment.
I meant when there is no such sticker. Even if the desire to know was not advertised, I believe it would be morally fine to report bad driving of a company vehicle to the entity liable for loss associated with the vehicle. As for the rest of your response, even though you pointed out a number of technical distinctions, I do not see a moral one.
> seems to fit the description of vigilantism . . .
Still no. Vigilante activity is by definition illegal, and this behavior is not.
You left off the last few words of my comment which stated that it met the definition as you had provided it.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vigilanteism
The definition as listed at reference.com is to simply take the law into ones own hands or without recourse to lawful procedures and doesn't include that it is unlawful or illegal in its own right. It seems pretty apparent that it can be argued this is attempting to punish individuals for unlawful actions "without recourse to lawful procedures."
This is nothing but vigilantism.