A woman drives with both hands on the wheel. Her phone sits face-down on her lap. No officer pulls her over. No lights flash. Weeks later, a $1,251 ticket arrives in the mail. The evidence: a single frame from a Camera surveillance app. The charge: phone use while driving.
Automated camera companies market their devices as automated license plate readers — tools for catching stolen cars, flagging warrants, and aiding serious investigations.
Sold as a Crime Tool. Used as a Fine Machine.
Since the article appears to be mostly a weird collection of badly referenced random cases, let me give you the primary source on the case in the headline:
https://www.tiktok.com/@kristakampz/video/7640403411845877012
Edit and also to save you having to go to tiktok, here’s a frame extracted from the video:
Note, this was in Alexandra Headland in Queensland in Australia. So no idea why the article cites Georgia law…
Also this is relevant: https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/mobile-phones
Illegal mobile phone use while driving includes:
- holding it in your hand
- resting on any part of your body (eg. your lap or shoulder)
If you hold your phone or have it on your body, you will be fined even if you’re not operating the phone, or it’s turned off.
So no idea why the article cites Georgia law…
Because there was another case in Georgia in December that they were citing as well. In fact they cite several cases in different parts of the country. The article is making a case for a supreme court challenge to these Constitution violating cameras and fines. The Australian cases just a viral opener for the topic.
Can’t be that viral if the tiktok is already two months old. I think they are just too bad at journalism to check their sources.
Does a phone in the pocket count as resting on any part of the body?
AI …
that’s why it cites Georgia law.Why is it illegal to have a phone in your lap? That doesn’t make sense. That’s bizarre.
Edit:
Really? This is a hot take? WTF!
If you write enough laws in a manner that makes it easy to violate them accidentally, then anyone can be prosecuted at any time and civil liberties can be removed via technicalities.
deleted by creator
Why is it illegal to have a phone in your lap?
Likely to make the law in any way practical to enforce. Many people will use their phone in the car by keeping it between their legs like a middle schooler hiding their phone use from their teacher. They can read messages or watch videos while keeping it out of their hands, but it’s still just as distracting.
You could just ban looking at a phone in your lap while driving, but then you have the nightmare of proving that someone who glanced down was actually looking at their phone, rather than just randomly glancing down for some other innocent reason. And they would have to glance down at their phone at the exact moment a camera or police officer saw them.
Phone use is actually very hard to enforce because of the nature of its use. People using their phone while driving don’t tend to continuously look at the phone the whole time they drive - they would be completely incapable of driving if they did so. Instead, they use it intermittently, such as while stopped at a traffic light or while cruising down the highway. That use is still enough to degrade their driving performance to the level of a drunk driver, but it’s not continuous. To make enforcement practical, you need to write the law so that it doesn’t require a lucky coincidence to enforce.
For an older comparable example, consider open container laws. You might reasonably ask, “wait, as long as I’m not drinking from it, why can’t I have an open beer in the car? Maybe I just want to take my half-finished beer home from the bar and finish it at home!” And while that would be a perfectly innocuous reason to have an open container of alcohol in the car, it would also make drunk driving laws much more difficult to enforce. You could only ticket someone for drinking in the car if they happen to take a sip right when you’re watching. Instead of trying to outlaw the infrequent action, you instead outlaw the necessary but continuous action. It’s not practical to only ban drinking in vehicles. Instead you ban having an open container, as “possessing an open container” is something a drunk driver will be doing for a protracted period of time.
It’s not a perfect approach to writing laws; you do end up criminalizing some innocuous behavior. But trade offs have to be made. Yes, it’s unfortunate that open container laws also make it so you can’t bring your half-finished drink home from the bar. And yes, it’s unfortunate that banning cell phone use while driving also requires banning just having a phone in your lap.
But if you’ve ever worked in a classroom, you’ll know that this is the only way to actually ban cell phone use while driving. Teachers learn very quickly they can’t just ban students from using their phones, they have to completely ban them from having them out at all. Relying on lucky coincidences to enforce laws is not a practical solution.
The only reason to have a phone in your lap while driving is if you intend to use said phone while driving.
Your phone fell off the dashboard phone stand, you caught it and set it in your lap.
Or you are currently using it and trying to be sneaky about it
That logic can be applied to anywhere in the car that the driver can reach. Is the Australian government suffering a collective stroke? Should we send help?
I honestly throw mine wherever without thinking about it. Def has been on lap or in crotch a few times.
A law that specified you were actively using the phone would be hard to enforce. Simmiliar to how it is usually illegal to have open alcohol within reach of the driver. The officer doesn’t have to actually see you drinking it.
How would it be hard to enforce? You can see it next their head.
Ever since video playback is possible. You no longer need to put your phone on your head to use it.
These are cargo cult laws. They don’t understand what the original laws were about. They just know “use phone in car bad” but they don’t know why. Used to you had to hold the phone to your head and block half of your vision.
I know in Western Australia, where I live, it is illegal to have the phone resting on any part of your body.
https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/road-safety-commission/mobile-phones-and-distractions
I wonder where the line is drawn between on your lap vs in your pocket. By that I mean, what if it is in a clear pouch on a lanyard around your neck, or in a running-armband. In both those cases it could still be used by need not have been touched while the car is driving.
If you slam on the brakes or maybe brake too sudden and it flies off and onto the floor, then it could potentially slide under a pedal (like the brakes), hindering its function.
Is it likely? Probably not, but it is a dangerous hazard waiting to happen.
I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the logic of this law and this was one of the things I considered they must be worried about. It’s not so much people using them, it’s just they don’t want them in the lap. Because Uber and Lyft drivers have to use them for work in the US. Here they have they often have a mount on the dash board to hold their phone and they’re constantly taking calls and checking maps.
As you say though it’s like a one in a million event freak accident if it flies off the lap and gets stuck under the pedal. It would be weird to pass a law for some off the wall scenario like that.
Yes it does. Your phone is in your lap so you can look at it. Keep it away. I know everyone is addicted to them but just drive without looking st it.
I don’t own a car. I ride a bicycle and take Ubers and Lyfts for long distance travel, and smart phones are like the spice mélange to those drivers. They seem to need them to navigate the Universe. So this law just seems terribly ill-conceived. The lap is just an oddly specific place to focus on. So you can set them on the dashboard, center console, or anywhere else, but the lap is the danger zone?
My main phone is a dumb phone. I hate smart phones and only got one specifically for Ubder and Lyfts, so I’m not addicted. So I’m standing outside looking in and it’s a bizarre law. Sure, we don’t want people playing Angry Birds while driving, but I don’t think this is a well thought out solution that does anything at all except cause more chaos and suffering.
I remember the NSA massive surveillance machine during the George W. Bush administration and Obama administration that tracked phone metadata and internet traffic that left or entered the US (which was used to justify a lot of surveillance of US citizens). Even after the Snowden disclosures of 2013 we were promised that the system was only meant to track foreign terrorists.
Then we learned that DEA had full access to it, and that NSA was sending hints to law enforcement about large amounts of cash in transit so it could be intercepted for purposes of asset forfeiture, what is nothing short of robbery of civilians by law enforcement officers.
This is an example of mission creep, in this case how it affects the surveillance state. Once we allow a method or technology to be used for major crime (like terrorism), it will eventually be used even for minor crime (like drug possession or distracted driving).
It’s very common for courts to forgive a violation of fourth amendment protections against unreasonable search when the violation presents evidence for a major crime, but then that case will be used as precedent when the same violation occurs and discovers a minor infraction.
This is how, during the aughts and 2010s, the Fourth Amendment was gutted by a long run of carve-outs. Now, a police officer or state agent can violate your privacy without a warrant via a whole range of exceptions:
~ If the crime they discover is significant (SCOTUS suggested controlled substance possession as an example)
~ Using specialized technology, say long-range multi-spectrum cameras, or using a drone.
~ If probable cause can be established. A favorite is a detection dog that signals on anything and has a 90%+ false positive rate.¹ (This is a particular beef of mine, since fake detection dogs are now more common than actual detection dogs, and dogs are losing their presumption of regularity as a result.)
~ If the police officer was acting in good faith, which is obtusely defined and is very hard to disprove.
~ If the suspect is non-white or otherwise suspicious due prejudice. Really, in a lot of counties, law enforcement are allowed to operate on hunches, or have a suspicious activity parameter list that is so encompassing (and often contradictory) that it’s impossible to not be suspicious.If you want to know how we got here these were already problems during the Obama administration when we had allegedly reasonable people in elected offices. And while they discussed the risk of too much power falling into the wrong hands, they felt compelled to keep it.
Whether the One Ring, or the Ring of Gyges, power without consequence is too seductive.
¹ A similar issue is the $2 roadside drug test which reacts to a lot of substances that aren’t controlled, such as glazed sugar off a donut. These were originally supposed to be then verified later in a lab, but instead were used to establish probable cause, and eventually were used as evidence in court.
This is wildly whack:
https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives
The system must do everything in its power to drive false convictions down to absolute zero.
Blackstone would agree with you.
Many, many people, in law enforcement and the judiciary would disagree…
…especially when it comes to minorities.
That’s the law here. Phone has to be securely stowed. Driving with it on your lap gets you a distracted driving ticket. Even if you weren’t planning on looking at it. A sudden traffic move means its falling on the floor and driver is going to try to reach for it.
My uncle once wrapped his car around a telephone pole because an orange fell off the seat and he was trying to pick it up.
I feel like there’s a clever fruit/apple/iphone joke in there somewhere but I can’t find it and I give up.
A coworker hit a parked car that way. Turning a RH corner he hooked his arm through the steering wheel to get to the passenger side, then popped up to see himself rear ending a car
obviously LLM-generated article from an odd outlet that publishes five articles every hour
the news is real because it just regurgitates 404media
The summary OP posted is LLM slop as well
that’s not a summary; that’s the first paragraphs of the article
An example of what people in positions of authority think is perfectly acceptable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District
School authorities surreptitiously and remotely activated webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home. After the suit was brought, the school district, of which the two high schools are part, revealed that it had secretly taken more than 66,000 images.
A lawsuit wasn’t enough, the administrators should be branded as sex offenders and the parents should have taken them out behind the school and beat the crap out of them.
I seem to recall something about a story where, like, a kids mom didnt know the camera was remotely turned on and walked through the room naked, after having just gotten out of the shower, and there was some kind of CPS investigation about it?
or is my brain mixing up several different school district voyeur stories together?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District
The school took 66,000 pictures of students in their bedrooms. School administrators should be listed as sex offenders but that doesn’t happen in the U.S. Case in point - our child rapist in chief.
Nope, that happened. If the institution spying on you in your home sees you naked, in your own home where you foolishly expect privacy, you’re a criminal.
Traffic cams violate our constitutional right to face our accuser in court.
Wouldn’t you just need a police officer to go to court and say they are accusing you based on said evidence and then you still face the accuser
The huge invasions of privacy seem like a much bigger issue but I am also not a legal expert
Traffic violations are rarely criminal cases.
It doesn’t violate constitutional rights as long as whatever the camera can detect/see would be the same as a police officer. If it has a license plate reader and face detection or whatever it’s unconstitutional because an officer probably wouldn’t have been able to issue a ticket if it were a person there instead of a camera. If it’s something like an obviously missing seatbelt or phone use seen through the window at a reasonable angle it’s constitutional.
I don’t understand the “face an accuser in court” argument. It’s a photo. You argue about the photo with the judge. The photo is your accuser.
No
The company sending the letter is the acccuser.
They need to explain how they interpreted the photo
Did you ever have a misunderstanding with someone that simply explaining it to each other cleared it up? How can a camera explain what it saw. The police officer wasn’t there and isn’t a witness. Also these cameras are not owned by the police. It’s a third party company that has a lease with them. So someone with no authority to make traffic stops is taking pictures of you and sending the bad stuff to police for money. Doesn’t that sound like a conflict of interest?
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
I think this is fair. It’s reasonable to require a stowed phone, and we don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while driving our cars. No essential liberty is being violated.
Spoken like a true fascist. Government mass surveillance and AI consolidation is tyranny.
Harsh
You don’t think an anarchist society would have any mechanism to stop people from driving dangerously?
Funny, isn’t liberty an inalienable right granted by The Creator?
Ben Franklin was an atheist
Are you sure? He definitely said and wrote things to the contrary, including the Declaration of Independence.
I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that He made the world, and governed it by His providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter.
I have no dog in this race, being neither American nor religious, but it seems like an important historical detail.
I assume they were thinking of Jefferson, but he would have been more of an agnostic (maybe). He just thought the virgin birth was bullshit, Jesus was some guy, and the point was to believe in caring for others basically. Apparently he just took all the miracles out and said, people should treat people better.
Which honestly sounds like a much less toxic version of beliefs. (But I’m sure that’s been white washed or rose tinted or what not over the years)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
I think we can agree he was a critic of organized religion, and that it’s pretty enlightened to not have the state impose religion on anyone.
That said I still think he (at least for a large chunk of his life) believed in the existence of a god, the god of Abraham/Christianity in particular.
Not every religious person feels the need to forcibly convert others.
Article:
Georgia law (OCGA 17-4-23) generally requires a traffic offense occur in the presence of an officer for a citation to be valid — raising direct legal questions about mail-in AI camera tickets.
Washington State caps automated camera fines at $145 under RCW 46.63.220 — far below what you might be paying too much when the viral ticket hits $1,251.
Five Albany, Georgia officers were criminally charged for misusing Flock plate-reader data for personal reasons, according to USA Today.
This was in Australia though
Find a flock employee and place its favorite pet around its house.
This has nothing to do with Flock, these cameras catch people who are breaking a law and don’t store/index footage otherwise, Flock is purely survailance tech, even if you do nothing wrong the point of flock is to survail.
and don’t store/index footage otherwise
How do they manage that, with the current surveillance regime? Is all the image processing on device? What’s it sampling against? How does it send the tickets? One-way infrared flashes?
I could be wrong but pre-Flock and letting the tech-Bros actually build a survailance state, most traffic cameras were designed to only flash when they caught someone breaking the law and so only send data off the device when needed.
How do they manage that
For speed/red light cameras it’s trivial, for something like this it’s pretty easy to process on device to detect a phone in your hand/lap, but probably does need someone to check for false positives.
Is all the image processing on device?
It should be, this is simple to do on device (unless it’s outsourced to Palantir & frens)
How does it send the tickets
Obviously when it triggers it uploads data.
it uploads data
… So. To the internet?
simple to do on device
Image recognition is not computationally cheap. There are more and less expensive ways to do it, but the absolute floor of it turns your phone into a hot plate. So whatever’s in there would need to be at least a phone chip.
someone needs to check
So it is kept and stored.
pre all-this-shit
Red light/speed cams, triggered on motion sensor boolean when light red or radar speed reading>x.
You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, which is fine, but why are you speaking confidently and assuming such good will about proven constant brazen liars saying they’re not doing the shit they literally always do?
You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about
Lmao.
You can literally detect phones with a raspberryPi the idea that you need to upload it to a server is ridiculous.
You can ‘detect phones’ via anything with WiFi. Are you trolling? Do you not understand the difference between image processing and simpler more computer readable signals?
You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. How are so many people so rabidly and confidently ignorant?
One I got a $125 ticket for driving 27 near a school on a Saturday in Washington, so no system is perfect…
Would be funny if it was a more modern vehicle, with a massive ipad that’s nearly bolted to your forehead and has displays on the back of every headrest.
I don’t know what town it is exactly (Kirkland or Kenmore, WA), and they had a speed limit posted as 30mph., but gave my friend a ticket for going over 28 in a 25 zone. They grayed out the speed limit in the photo they sent that was approved by a cop. My friend would’ve had to go and get a picture of the sign to prove what assholes they were. I remember the sign and know for a fact that it said 30. Not enough to fight it, but enough to stay the fuck away from that town.
Some towns literally just exist to extract money from nonlocals who don’t know to not go through there. There’s one near where I grew up that transitions from a 60 mph to a 30 mph zone at the bottom of a hill, so if you aren’t riding your brakes the whole way down you’re speeding. And of course the cops love to sit there and pop people with tickets for it.
Same sort of speed traps used to be along the only route to a casino I went to a few times. My first time driving to the casino, they were laying in wait. I got caught on the way back.
Pigs sure do love to jam people up. Bonus points if they ruin the life of a minority! There certainly are no such thing as quotas, right?
Emporia, Virginia is another notorious one, right on heavily traveled I-95 as well as US-58. Virginia has front license plates, so the cars that don’t have front plates definitely aren’t from Virginia and if there’s a group of cars all going the same speed it’s the easy way to pick out the non-local. Saw it happen when I was a passenger.
That happened to my dad too, he was going “one over the limit.” It’s infuriating because it’s fraud and stealing.
I think that lazy shitty cops do a lot to malign common sense safety engineering that most people would otherwise be totally on board for.
Old guy told me in addition to photos you should request all documentation regarding that specific sign and that stretch of road, such as the work order to have it installed. Public records laws vary lol
Wow, good to look into if ever defrauded like this!
Not enough to fight it
if that’s not worth fighting then nothing is. I’ve met High school kids that have fought tickets before. U.S. Traffic Courts are notoroious for being extraordinarily mundane
They would have fought it if you could fight it like a normal ticket, but you couldn’t. You could pay or write them a stern letter that would mean nothing. Seattle has those kinds of tickets too. This would have had to have been a trip to the AG or something. I don’t know how they would have fought it without a lawyer.
Hey, they could connect the car ‘driver attention camera’ thing, the OBD car speed stuff, and the in-car GPS to the municipality, the insurance company, and your credit card or bank account.
That way, the minute you look away, go a little over the speed limit, or check your phone message, they just gouge some cash out of your bank account. After three of these, your insurance rate goes up. After the tenth time, your health insurance and employer will be notified.
Fun times! 🎉
Edit: every damn step of this is now available via APIs or Agentic MCPs. There is zero technical barrier for this happening. Sleep tight y’all.
People that get caught driving drunk get an alcohol lock on their car, let’s at the very least install a speed check (hard limiter or the automatic fine thing) in repeat offenders’ cars
So glad that I choose to drive, I love having a depreciating asset that costs 25% of my income when it’s running properly to drive nearly an hour to work every day (and almost get murdered several times).
There is zero technical barrier for this happening.
I guess we’ll have to make a disincentivization barrier instead.
Wouldn’t they have to prove it was a phone and not some black address book or something
Meanwhile in NYC they’re only allowed to put traffic cameras in school zones, they’re speed-based only, the fine is like $100, and drivers can rack up dozens of tickets without any consequence to the standing of their drivers license.
I dunno man, I feel like there’s a happy medium in traffic enforcement automation between these two extremes? It’s almost as if stuff like the Georgia example exists to provide ammunition to the opponents in NYC who successfully defanged traffic cameras up there. With a thin veneer over the top that this is about surveillance.
Flock cameras, AI surveillance, etc is bad. But the specific examples and criticisms being brought up, like this one, feel very disingenuous in the face of how many Americans die to distracted drivers every year. Like are we actually pushing back against AI state surveillance, or are we defending the “right” of motorists to be wildly dangerous to those around them?
Should breathalyzers be mandated in every vehicle because of the number of deaths due to drunk drivers? Should there be mass pedestrian surveillance with facial recognition to prevent crime because there are lots of criminals that use sidewalks?
The problem with any kind of mass surveillance is the information gathered will always be misused because that’s what those in positions of power always do. Police officers are already using camera information to monitor the whereabouts of their exes and girlfriends. Now the data’s being used as a revenue source, not for public safety.
Another example - Schools remotely enabled cameras (and disabled the camera LED) on their student’s PCs and actually spied on those students in their own bedrooms. Administrators saw absolutely nothing wrong with it and tried to punish those students if they didn’t like what they saw.
In my opinion there isn’t any possibility for a happy medium, it’s eventually going to be all or nothing.
You think that automated radar-based speed enforcement of those that go 15MPH over the limit in school zones during school hours with no detrimental effects to license status is a slippery slope to a panoptic AI surveillance state?
Because personally I think that as a society we can and should agree upon reasonable tests for overreach and abuse of technological systems, and build automations that respect those tests.
We both agree that AI surveillance is bad. You just stumped against it for a whole comment, but I already said AI surveillance is bad. That was not my point, my point is that I find this article’s approach to the problem of AI surveillance problematic in that it’s leveraging the reaction that drivers have toward any automation whatsoever to make an emotional case against AI surveillance that I feel amplifies pushback against otherwise reasonable automations that catch egregiously dangerous use (eg The radar cameras in place in NYC) an muddiest and important distinction. I just don’t like the way this article is pitched.
Great. Let me make sure my phone sits somewhere that hides it from view overhead when im not using it.
Ive been leaving my phone home more and more when I go places. I can’t wait until I get a citation for not having a phone.
