It's a byproduct of Russians using them to combat corruption and scammers on the road. It's a fad that caught on based upon the underlying need. In the US most citizens don't have that underlying need. The cops, on the other hand, do have burden of proof and liability concerns, so police cars do have them. If the average citizen could be extorted on the highway they'd start to catch on here too :)
> If the average citizen could be extorted on the highway they'd start to catch on here too :)
Actually, after having driven tens of thousands of miles on the interstates a number of years ago I think they would be a tremendous improvement on rest stop safety at the very least. That may be better served by an omnidirectional parking cam (and it would have to be running all the time, or you would need to flip it on), but I don't think it's a bad trend. It's certainly more appropriate than asking the state to manage/install even more surveillance nodes...
Edit: by 'it' I meant recording devices in vehicles, put there by the vehicle owner.
Possibly. From a privacy pov, I suppose I'd also prefer a decentralized option like this, where everybody just gets their own small slice of all the data instead of one government collecting all of it in a centralized location. It might be slightly less efficient, but in general it's a better way of roughly getting the data just where it needs to be, as long as it needs to be.
Also note that the thing that caught on = something with a rather direct very personal advantage to the adopter, while your suggestion (that hasn't caught on) = something that personally helps against very rare events and sort of increase ambient security for everyone. Some lesson about human nature, here :)
From a privacy pov, decentralized is worse, is it not? If no one can enforce a no-recording rule, there will eventually be available video of essentially everything.
I think that's exactly the world we're heading for, and I prefer it to a world in which some entity has the power to compel the absence of recording, but Schmidt is very likely to be right: privacy is dead.
