A new app which has been developed which allows users to record the speed of passing vehicles has divided opinion and forced the founder to go into hiding due to a torrent of abuse.
The Speedcam Anywhere app, works by firstly recording the vehicle’s number plate to find the make and model of the car and then determines the distance between the axles of the car before comparing it with footage to calculate the speed. Users have the option of saving the video, or sending to local authorities, although the Home Office are unlikely to use the footage as evidence as the app’s algorithm is not yet verified.
The app is currently banned on the Apple AppStore and Google Play, and public reaction to app has been mixed, with some comparing it to the East German Stasi, where members of the public were encouraged to report their neighbours.
“It’s a Marmite product – some people think it’s a good idea, some people think that it turns us into a surveillance state,” said the app’s founder ‘Sam’ when speaking to The Guardian anonymously.
“I can see both sides of that, but I think that if you’re going to have speed limits, then it’s the law that you obey them, and you should enforce the law. It’s not a personal vendetta against anyone, it’s just – how do we make our roads safe? There are 20,000 serious injuries on the roads every year – how can we reduce them? And the way we reduce them is we make a deterrent to speeding.”
But with a dwindling number of traffic police on the roads, and motorists already encouraged to submit dashcam footage of dangerous driving to a Government backed website, it might only be a matter of time before the app becomes used as evidence.
“I think this is a step in the bigger journey of how we make our roads safer and more accessible for everybody,” ‘Sam’ said.
“Having roads that are just too dangerous for kids to cycle to school on, having roads that are too dangerous for parents let their kids cross – I think that’s wrong, and society needs to get over it. Make the roads safer, make them less unpleasant, and then we can start to look at how else we can move around.”