No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year

Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by AnthonyMouse on Saturday August 02, 2025 @04:17PM (#44771024)

> Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles.

Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR, and by the time the hardware capable of doing ALPR is installed, they'll then have the incentive to record every passing vehicle in a database whether it was speeding or not, and whether or not they're "allowed" to do that when the camera is initially installed.

It's like banning end-to-end encryption while promising not to do mass surveillance. Just wait a minute and you know what's coming next.

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Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by crote on Saturday August 02, 2025 @04:51PM (#44771359)

So get the government to purchase speed traps with photo cameras instead of video cameras, triggered by a speed detection loop in the road itself. You know, just like speed traps have been working for decades?

Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

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Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by AnthonyMouse on Saturday August 02, 2025 @05:29PM (#44771709)

> So get the government to purchase speed traps with photo cameras instead of video cameras, triggered by a speed detection loop in the road itself.

Photo cameras would still be doing ALPR. Changing from "take a photo of cars that are speeding" to "take a photo of every car and only send tickets to the ones that are speeding" is a trivial software change that can be done retroactively at any point even after the cameras are installed.

> Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

How does this address the concern that they're going to use ALPR for location tracking? They would just do the same thing with the cloud service.

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Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by hgomersall on Saturday August 02, 2025 @04:40PM (#44771244)

There's actually an incentive to not store more data than is necessary, like the jenoptik average speed cameras, which only store info on speeding vehicles: https://www.jenoptik.com/products/road-safety/average-speed-...

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Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by AnthonyMouse on Saturday August 02, 2025 @05:37PM (#44771774)

The incentive you're referring to is a law. The problem is that a primary entity you don't want tracking everyone is the government, and governments (like other entities) are notoriously ineffective at enforcing rules against themselves. The public also has no reliable means to establish that they're not doing it as they claim, and even if they're not doing it today, you're still rolling out a huge network of cameras waiting to have the switch flipped overnight.

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Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by Muromec on Saturday August 02, 2025 @05:53PM (#44771925)

>Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR

s/will/are/

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Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by CalRobert on Saturday August 02, 2025 @04:57PM (#44771400)

Are you a car?

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Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year by Earw0rm on Sunday August 03, 2025 @04:02AM (#44774953)

Good.

Freedom to move around the city anonymously does not mean freedom to move around the city in a 2000kg, 100kW heavy machine anonymously.

Even the US recognises that the right to bear arms doesn't extend to an M1A1 Abrams.

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