> In 5 years, if you say “I don’t have a smart phone” you’ll just be denied service. Period. No questions asked.
IANAL, but I feel like that should be illegal.
Sure, they can set up an app and those who want to use it may do so, but for things things like parking there ought to be an alternate. Beach, national park etc is a predominantly offline service for which it's absurd to insist on using an app.
Especially for something that's on a "national park" — I don't really know what the "national" part indicates (not from USA) but I'm assuming that the govt is involved.
Somebody should go to court.
The noose is tightening around the necks of those few of us who do not use smartphones. I hope a future wave of 'tech minimalism' gains enough traction to ensure that there are alternatives, but for now, as we ride the wave of tech-optimism and the mass adoption of intrusive technologies in the name of convenience or cost cutting, most people seem to see asking for alternatives as unreasonable.
There is an element of innate freedom in anonymous, analogue processes, even if they are not entirely 'anonymous' - such as writing a car license plate number on an envelope of cash for a drop box - it might as well be if the information is never entered into a searchable digital database where it will presumably be stored for eternity.
I few years ago I went camping at a state park in a system that had recently introduced usage fees (having always been free in the past). The state apparently partnered with some obscure parking app company to collect the fees. The use of the state park required submitting a considerable amount of information to a third party, with little or no information on how that data might be used, stored, or sold - in essence you had no choice but to submit to a third party's TOS in order to use public facilities at all. I did not like this at all, and having no smartphone, I paid cash at the manned office - only to have them collect my information and enter it into the parking app database.
A few months ago someone here made a comment in another discussion about having a pervasive sense that things are not quite as they should be. That stuck with me.
In the US, there are still large groups of Mennonites whose choices to avoid most post-19th century technology are generally well-accepted by the rest of the population, the best known of which are the Amish. They do travel around to varying extents, because not every Mennonite community agrees to what degree to avoid technology and under what circumstances - some have a community cellphone, some even have family cars (with a preference for less showy models); many are fine with taking public transit or hiring an "English" (non-Amish) driver. Individual smartphone ownership and use would conflict very strongly with what I understand of even the most "liberal" Amish communities, though.
There's got to be some sort of alliance that privacy-conscious techies can form with technology-skeptical religious communities, despite radically different worldviews.
No you can't just use a web app.
Nooooo...this is dark UX to artificially increase the number of violators and collect more revenue.
I expected better from the park service but around here they've started making people enter their license plate number on parking lot passes too to prevent the time-honored tradition of sharing day passes. They're in revenue-generating mode these days.
Case in point:
I had to drop off a cashier's check at a landlord's office. Same deal-- paid streetside parking, but didn't realize it was app-only. I struggled with downloading the app on a crappy connection and couldn't successfully pay for parking after 45 minutes of fucking with it.
What am I going to do, leave? I drove an hour to get there and had 3 minutes' worth of business there. In the end I just ended up parking illegally.
To be any scummier, they'd have to implement paid parking at rest stops and ticket anybody who dashes past the meter trying to get to the bathroom before they piss themselves.
For example, I went to visit the beach, which is on a national park. Parking required an app. There were park rangers there, the location was staffed, but they did not accept cash or credit card. Just an app. And there are two phone operating systems now, Apple and Android. So no. Can’t live without FAANG. I ended up downloading the app on the spot and purchasing a pass.
I’m sure the park service does this for their convenience. And it’s so populated near the coasts that if anyone doesn’t comply, they still have plenty of people who would gladly use the app. They can get away with demanding smartphone use. You can certainly get away with not having a smartphone further inland, and not needing to depend on FAANG explicitly. But I know this expectation is going to creep into the continent over time. In 5 years, if you say “I don’t have a smart phone” you’ll just be denied service. Period. No questions asked. And you will be considered the unreasonable party by most.