[dave78]

Isn't the most likely outcome here that the city will simply stop allowing public access to the camera feeds?

This feels like it has the potential to be a "this is why we can't have nice things" outcome even though I don't think the app author is doing anything wrong.

[autoexec]

What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it? I'm sure there are corporations and data brokers quietly collecting info on us using every scrap of publicly avilable data including traffic cams, but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?

If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.

[academia_hack]

The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost cloud vaults (e.g. glacier) and then offer lawyers/clients in traffic disputes access to footage that may have captured an accident for exorbitant rates. It's a remarkable little ecosystem of privatized mass surveillance.

[dahart]

You’re framing this like it’s a bad thing, but a video of an accident is pretty valuable to someone falsely accused of causing an accident, and in that case the people with the video aren’t the bad guy, the person lying about causing the accident is. Storing 50 million videos isn’t cheap. The rates seem reasonable considering the volume of data they store, most of which is useless, and the small number of customers in their target market - I see 1 hour blocks of video in NYC cost $250. That’s like 10 minutes of lawyer time, if you’re lucky, and totally reasonable and worth it to settle an accident dispute if the alternative is paying the other guy thousands. I might even speculate that the intended customer here is insurance companies and maybe not individual drivers. If so, insurance companies are well prepared to do their own cost/benefit price analysis. So… why do you think this is bad? And what surveillance uses are you worried about outside of car accidents? The cost of the videos means nobody is doing any “mass surveillance” here, that the vast majority of the video gets deleted unanalyzed and unwatched.

[pierrefermat1]

Actually curious what the minimum bitrate/resolution they could store with to be still usable in court

[potato3732842]

Probably damn near zero if you have time stamps. A couple one pixel blobs would do if all you're trying to prove is that some idiot got dead because they cut a garbage truck off and that the garbage truck didn't rear end them or, or some other simple "he said she said" situation like that

[cinjon]

What are the companies you know of here?

[academia_hack]

Check out: https://trafficcamarchive.com/ for an example.

[cinjon]

Right, that's one. And it's the only one that comes up when I search. Are there others you know of?

[gruez]

>but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?

There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.

>Office of Legal Affairs recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Morry Kolman, the artist behind the project, charging that the TCP "encourages pedestrians to violate NYC traffic rules and engage in dangerous behavior."

[autoexec]

> There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.

What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work. The value in making that data public isn't so that Joe Average can track traffic volume over time just like the DoT is already doing. It's for transparency and so that the public can find new and innovative uses for the information our tax money is already being spent on gathering.

There's no point if we're not allowed to use that data in new ways and we don't need the kind of "transparency" that only applies as long as the public isn't looking.

If a specific use is actually dangerous then that can be dealt with on a case by case basis, and it's arguable that they were right to send a cease and desist letter to this website, but making the data itself unavailable over it would be an overreaction

[macNchz]

> What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work.

Personally I do find it useful to be able to glance at the NYC traffic cams as a supplement to traffic maps, not only because having an actual visual on the traffic can help me decide on a driving route better than red or green map lines or a routing algorithm I know will take me on an inferior path to “avoid” perceived traffic, but also because the cameras pick up other nearby stuff. I like to go on runs over the Brooklyn Bridge, but it’s so swarmed with tourists most of the time that I’ll check the DOT cameras so I can see if the pedestrian path is clear enough to run on without being clotheslined by a selfie stick.

I also spend a lot of time north of the city, and the state highway traffic cams are great for checking the plowing status during/after winter storms before setting off for a trip.

[ryandrake]

This seems to happen every time some stuffy SeriousAgency or SeriousCompany opens something up to the public. The public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it.

SeriousCompany: "Look how cool and in tune we are with the public, here's this resource that you can all use. High five! [...] Oh, wait, no, what you're doing is bad for our image... No, stop, we didn't mean for you to do... No, don't enjoy it that way... Wait, stop, we didn't think of that at all! Oh, god no you're using it to post Amogus Porn! SHUT IT DOWN!!!"

[try_the_bass]

But sometimes SeriousCompany says "we'll provide this public resource so people can do X, Y, and Z", and then someone does A and gets a cease and desist?

It's an open resource, sure, but the provider of the resource can still set limits on its use, even after it's been available for some time. Often that includes things like "don't use our free resource to make yourself money".

That seems like an entirely reasonable request to me?

Something being freely available does not inherently grant you the right to use it however you'd like. It's pretty unhelpful to conflate the two things.

[StockHuman]

You’re conflating a license to use something granted without charge and something actually free to the public. Licenses come with terms, public resources only come with social pressures of fair use.

It is unfair for SeriousCompany to pretend that resources it releases to the public (usually as a PR move or to advertise a paid product) must flatter their motives and the narrow confines of what they envisioned the public might use them for. That is wishing a free resource had a license when it only has a social contract. If the provider could set limits, it would no longer be free.

[JumpCrisscross]

> public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it

Because it prompts a serious question: why are taxpayers paying for this?

[autoexec]

While you'll always find some people who don't think taxes should pay for anything ever in this case I think there's clear value in the DoT monitoring traffic volumes so the cameras already exist. It's not as if there's some huge cost for those camera feeds to be put online where the public can easily access them. The footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records.

[pests]

You just quoted that the public is using it - isn't that why we pay for it?

[spaceribs]

Why are taxpayers paying to enjoy the thing they paid for?

[try_the_bass]

> What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it?

Regular people have been using it for decades, though? Scrolling through the comments here are plenty of people who have discovered and put these cameras to use in their daily lives.

Something being freely provided does not inherently grant consumers the right to do with it whatever they please. The producers, being the one freely providing the things, seem well within their rights to set limits on its usage, no? Sure, sometimes things are freely produced with the express point being that they can be used without limitations, but this isn't an inherent property of the thing being freely available.

I mean, why else do we have so many different open source licensing models?

[zmgsabst]

Government generally can’t on a public resource.

[try_the_bass]

That seems like a problem that should be remedied, not an excuse to behave badly and blame it on lack of enforceability?

[TeMPOraL]

> If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.

Average American probably won't be using it.

This seems to be the hole in Kant's categorical imperative[0] - plenty of useful things fail the test of universality, because there isn't one class, or two classes, but three classes of people: those who find some use for a thing, those who don't and thus don't care, and then those who have no use for the thing but don't like it anyway. And in the past century or so, thanks to the role of mass media, that third class is ruling the world.

And so...

> but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?

Yes, it is. It's how this has been playing out time and again - once the attention seekers, and people with overactive imagination wrt. dystopias, and maybe the few with some actually reasonable objections join forces, it's better to shut the thing down as soon as possible, to minimize the amount of time your name can be found on the front pages of major newspapers. At that point, there's little hope to talk things out and perhaps rescue the project in some form - outraged public does not do calm or rational, and if you somehow survive the first couple days and the public still cares, you're destined to become a new ball in the political pinball machine. With your name or life on the line, it's usually much easier to cut your losses than to stand on principle, especially for something that's inconsequential in the grander scheme of things.

One by one, we're losing nice things - not as much because they're abused, but mostly because there's always some performative complainers ready to make a scene. We won't be getting nice things back until our cultural immunity catches up, until we inoculate ourselves against the whining.

See also, [1] and [2].

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

[1] - Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines", though the (apparently) more accurate version from https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 is even better: "with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because the business can be interpreted in such a way, that one can easily find what one wishes." More boring than malevolent, and thus that much more real; it reads like a HN comment.

[2] - Disney's Tomorrowland is, in a way, a commentary on this phenomenon; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405210 is, in a way, a commentary on that.

[euniceee3]

That is what happened to the local feed for the city I live in. Their mapping data was trash. I went through fixed the GPS, found the typical focalized center of frame, built a basic frontend, and then they shut it all down.

I found the dude that ran it and emailed back and forth with him for a few years. They made excuses about how it is an IT issue.

[7speter]

> They made excuses about how it is an IT issue.

An ego issue

[alufers]

A bit tangential, but in Poland we also had such traffic cameras with public access (it wasn't a live feed, but a snapshot updated every minute or so). It was provided by a company which won a lot of tenders for IT infrastructure around roads (https://www.traxelektronik.pl/pogoda/kamery/).

What is interesting to me is that the public access to the cameras has been blocked a few months after the war in Ukraine started. For a few months I could watch the large convoys of equipment going towards Ukraine, and my personal theory is that so did the MoD of Russia. I haven't seen any reports about that, just my personal observation.

[avh02]

Would have been a good opportunity to inject misinformation after they noticed (assuming it's what happened)... Convoy passing by? Quick, splice in alternative footage that has equivalent traffic/weather conditions. (Or an infinite convoy to scare them)

Or just block it i guess.

[zulban]

If you cannot harmlessly use it publicly then it never was a "nice thing we had".

[blackeyeblitzar]

Why does NYC even care? This tendency to govern in a controlling way is not just weird but plain unethical. I hope this goes viral and embarrasses them.

[Spooky23]

NYC government is peculiar, in that its size and scope is like a US state, but it also subsumes the functions of US cities and counties. The closest comparison in the US is probably LA County.

Thinking about it in terms of technology — during the pandemic the schools bought a million iPads. They also run a giant hospital system, the largest police and fire departments in the country, etc.

The net result is administration of a vast, sprawling (both horizontal and vertical) bureaucracy is complex, and the cogs in the wheel of that bureaucracy are simultaneously in your face and detached from reality. So you have a group of attorneys who see a threat in people posing in front of a camera.

[throwaway2037]

You first paragraph raises some interesting points. It makes wonder if NYC police and fire is larger than that of some smaller countries in Europe, like Belgium or Netherlands. My guess: Yes!

[ericbarrett]

Indeed, the NYPD has 33,000 officers and Belgium's armed forces have 24,000 serving plus 6000 reserve. They also have very similar budgets: $6b vs. €7b.

[dave78]

Agree in spirit, though again if it does go viral and they become embarrassed the most likely thing is they'd shut down public access to the cameras - which would be a lousy outcome for everyone.

My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.

[noprocrasted]

This is an opportunity for bullshitters (in a "bullshit jobs" sense) to be seen as "doing something" and get pats on the back without significant effort - at least less effort than doing other, actually valuable things.

[highcountess]

The response to that should be filing lawsuits to force the government to make public resources like that publicly accessible.

[lostlogin]

A you request footage of yourself at a specified place and time?

Having a semi automated way of doing that would be far more irritating for them.

[kayo_20211030]

> "this is why we can't have nice things"

Of course, it'll be used, but that's just a bad, bad argument at any level.

[try_the_bass]

It really isn't, though? The Tragedy of the Commons is a real thing that affects real resources every day?

[kayo_20211030]

I think we're in agreement. The "that's why we can't have nice things" argument happens at the end when traffic cams' public access is taken away because some clever soul found a novel use for the publicly available information (i.e. taking selfies), and the authorities were put out by it. So, public information gets locked down on spurious grounds, and the same clever soul is wrongly blamed for it. That's not fair, but someone will say ".. and that's why we can't have nice things", and others will say "yeah. that guy ruined it for everyone".

It's a bad argument as it ends up putting the blame on the wrong party.

[try_the_bass]

But in these cases, it is the "clever soul" who's to blame, especially if they cannot be legally restricted from being "clever".

Like I said in another part of this thread: we should not be confounding "freely available" with "free to use without limitation". The various forms of open source licensing are testament to this concept: some things are indeed freely offered; others stipulate that you can't use them to make money without also offering your source code freely, etc. In both cases, the code is offered freely, but in the latter case, you're not legally allowed to use it without limitation.

Public information is often taken down because it can't be limited in such ways, and it relies on an honor system of sorts. Once people stop being honorable, there is no other choice but to take the resource away. The fault there absolutely rests with the individuals that have violated the implicit honor system.

[Dylan16807]

There is nothing dishonorable in taking pictures of yourself. This clever soul is not acting outside reasonable limits, and should not be blamed.

[try_the_bass]

This "clever soul" is trying to monetize this work, and encouraging others to do the same, which is pretty sketch.

It's pretty clear that the providers of a key piece of their endeavor aren't happy with them using the public infrastructure in this way. Is it not dishonorable to go against someone's wishes when they're providing something charitable?

[kayo_20211030]

Good point.

But, for a lot of things, we have to exist in the gap between ethics and law. If someone, with access to ostensibly public NYCDOT information, uses it for "dishonorable" (not illegal) purposes, the DOT has three choices: legislate its use, remove it completely, or ignore the issue. Whatever they do, with the exception of the ignore option, will result in the vilification of our clever soul. That person did not make any of the decisions that caused the removal of the previously accessible public information. They just had a thing, they used it, and something happened. Could that have been foreseen? Maybe, but marginal. Guaranteed? Probably not at all. I just don't think that blame is fair. Let the NYCDOT do what it'll do and the rest of us can replot our courses if necessary.

OSS libraries, released to the web or wherever, have the same set of choices; and the authors can do as they please. It's their stuff, and their right entirely. But, blaming someone who acted "dishonorably" and resulted in a novel set of legal restrictions on an OSS library doesn't seem right either.

[try_the_bass]

This is where intent becomes important.

If someone took an open source library that had a restrictive license, and used it in violation of that license, if it can be proven that they did so with the intention of ignoring the license, they can be held accountable. In this case, even if they were ignorant of the license, they can still be held accountable. We can definitely assign blame to these people, and more so in the case of the one doing it with malicious intent.

So why is the same not true of these cameras? Especially if now this person has been informed that their usage is against the wishes of the provider; even if it's questionable whether or not the initial usage is "dishonorable", once the provider's intentions have been made clear, if the "clever soul" persists, it's not out of malice, which is definitely dishonorable.

Intentionally violating someone's expressed preferences is often legal, but I think it's almost uniformly seen as a negative (i.e. dishonorable) thing. Except in the most extreme cases, where someone's preferences are generally considered unreasonable, we have good reason to treat those who ignore preferences as untrustworthy or unjust.

So there exists a fourth option: NYCDOT makes a plain request that this kind of usage stop, and then rely on people to honor those wishes. This is like basic social reciprocity, so I'm constantly amazed by how many people argue that we shouldn't engage in it. At the end of the day, that's what you're saying we should do: be fine with people who are asked to stop, and who respond with "no, you can't make me". It's not unreasonable that NYCDOT ask that their cameras not be used to gain people likes or viewers or money; but it does strike me as unreasonable to applaud people who intentionally ignore (and even flout!) the lack of enforceability of that ask.