[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?