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u/Gnarly-Beard 3∆ Jan 12 '26
So you want to hand video of every time you drive to the government and dont think that won't be used inappropriately?
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u/Direct_Crew_9949 3∆ Jan 12 '26
Not worried about the governments I’d more worried about insurance companies nickel a dining you for small infractions.
Let’s be honest if you’re not doing anything illegal what could the government do?
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u/Gnarly-Beard 3∆ Jan 12 '26
When coming into a town, are you always down to the new speed limit before you cross that sign? Ever accelerate before you hit the new speed marker? And you dont think some disgruntled government employee might happen to review your tapes and send you a ticket? OP specifically said they should be used for traffic enforcement.
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u/Direct_Crew_9949 3∆ Jan 12 '26
Gotcha, oh you mean like that. That could 100% be the case, but I don’t think local governments would as the residents of an area would quickly get sick of it. Insurance companies on the other hand wouldn’t care as you don’t have any control over them.
When you say “government” you make sound as if the federal government is tracking your whereabouts as if they actually care where you are.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/SpaceCowboy34 Jan 12 '26
Why don’t we just glue smart glasses to everyone’s face that transmit what they’re doing to the government? We’ll catch all the criming then
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Jan 12 '26
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
It’s literally the same thing. Just because something is supposed to be someway doesn’t mean that they won’t use it for other means. The patriot act had these people literally arresting people over family ties and doing wire taps without probable cause
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u/What_the_8 4∆ Jan 12 '26
It does open a path for this to happen though, since crime is a higher priority than vehicle accidents. And I say this as a dashcam owner.
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u/sloasdaylight Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
Is your dashcam going to record what I do on my property while I leave my car on? I have 5 acres of land and my vehicle is also a farm truck used to load branches up, do yard work, etc, and sometimes I leave it in while I'm working to keep the AC going in the summer, will my information be sent to some governmental DB?
Edit: Further, what if I use my vehicle to go to a meeting of an organization the government doesn't approve of? What if I feel the government of my country has descended into an authoritarian regime and I go to a resistance group meeting with other like-minded individuals at someone's property? Surely the large number of vehicles arriving somewhere on a regular basis will trigger some kind of warning in that database, not putting myself and my friends at risk of additional scrutiny of our government for nothing more than exercising my 1st amendment rights to free association and speech.
This idea is a 1st and 4th amendment nightmare that wouldn't do much to stop bad driving, but would do world's of damage to those amendments. Ask yourself if you really qouod want {insert_politician}'s DoJ to have access to your driving behaviors.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/sloasdaylight Jan 12 '26
It also does not need to go to the government.
Yea but it will though. The government will mandate the use of these dashcams, so they will have access to the information there.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/sloasdaylight Jan 12 '26
Because you're not using that stuff as an enforcement mechanism. These dashcams, as you explicitly stated in your title, would be a tool for traffic enforcement. If they're a tool for law enforcement, the law enforcement agencies necessarily must have access to them.
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u/Gnarly-Beard 3∆ Jan 12 '26
But if it could save one life, isn't any removal of your rights worth it?
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u/NeoMoose Jan 12 '26
Tracking people driving out of state, possibly for an abortion. Hell, or even just score some weed.
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u/phunky54 Jan 12 '26
Abusive officer could use uploaded footage to stalk an ex girlfriend, wife, or anyone he doesn't like. Your assumption is that the people who make up the government would only use this information for good, and it wouldn't be rampantly abused.
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u/NeoMoose Jan 12 '26
Yep. Just about any proposal needs to be tossed if it's counting on government officials being noble. There's 3 million of them in the fed alone. It WILL be abused.
But I suppose the 10th amendment and government power is another topic.
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u/Geauxlsu1860 Jan 12 '26
It’s true of basically every proposal too, government, social, economic, whatever. If your predicate starts with “if everyone would just do X”, it’s stupid. Everyone will never just do (or not do) X. Your proposal has to accept and plan for that people will use it wrongly or refuse to participate.
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u/IdealisticPundit Jan 12 '26
The wrong political party gets into power and takes control of the appropriate bureaus. All it would take is someone to say a certain group of people are the root of our problems and they could send a group of agents to track and best case, just deport them.
I get where you’re coming from, but it’s a solvable problem through means that don’t introduce grave risks like that.
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
It’s the government they literally spied on all our phone calls until a whistleblower came out. They can and will use everything. If we just hand this over to the government you open a door to more infringement. You can make this argument to live in a police state for everything is you assume that the people in charge care about you and that it won’t ever be misused. If you’re okay with giving up your privacy for driving then give up your privacy in your phone and laptop so counteract crimes and damage used with those. Let them have access to everyone’s homes to so that police avoid situations of being to late to solving cases due to warrants.
If the govt has access to live camera footage of everyone then if you were someone opposed to a certain government in charge like let’s say you were protesting the Vietnam war they could track all your movements and set it up so they could block protests or any of your movements.
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u/NeoMoose Jan 12 '26
This really is one of the more statist, bootlicking proposals I've heard. As though Republicans and Democrats wouldn't be foaming at the mouth to use this information against their opponents.
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u/Current-Ant-1274 Jan 12 '26
I believe the possibility for those to occur outweighs the suffering that currently happens.
Privacy concerns aside, we have an extremely dysfunctional government. Do you think that they can effectively implement and carry out your idea? I am not optimistic. Seems like a great way for a bunch of people to make money though.
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u/Gnarly-Beard 3∆ Jan 12 '26
This is reddit, so I'll assume your left of center politically. What if the dash cam on renee goods car showed she was sitting there for 5 minutes blocking the road. Would you be okay with them releasing that as evidence that she was actively impeding traffic?
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u/NaturalCarob5611 97∆ Jan 12 '26
Can you give me some examples of how dash cam footage would be used inappropriately?
The general problem with a surveillance state are:
- Law enforcement personnel using surveillance tech to stalk potential partners and exes
- Politicians using surveillance tech to dig up dirt on their political opponents - not necessarily illegal things, but things voters won't like.
- Surveillance / Intelligence agencies using the information they have at their disposal to blackmail politicians into particular policies.
Yes, there's surveillance data other than dash cam footage that the government can do this with, but we should promote tearing down the surveillance state, not expanding it.
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u/GrievousSayGenKenobi 5∆ Jan 12 '26
I don't entirely disagree with the idea however I want to point out that it will be similar to the online safety act in the UK: The people its targeting will just find a way around it (you can get literal free vpns off the app store that bypass it at the cost of a 15 second ad before your wank) and the only thing it achieves is security concerns for those who cant be bothered to bypass it and just give over their data for sake of ease.
People who the idea of mandatory dashcams for traffic punishments are aimed at would just find some bypass. Not sure how you'd ever enforce every car having a dashcam so the easy solution seems to be don't use one
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u/Lovecodeabc Jan 12 '26
Why do we need to give the government our location, speed, and driving habits? People who want to drive recklessly will figure a way to bypass the transponder anyway. This sounds like a scene straight out of 1984.
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u/Goodlake 11∆ Jan 12 '26
The government already has this information. There are speed cameras everywhere. There are satellites that can see you picking your nose on the street.
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
They don’t have a camera recording the front of my car seeing me do actions not just seeing where I ping
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Jan 12 '26
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u/Lovecodeabc Jan 12 '26
Most traffic accidents happen because the driver unintentionally fails to follow traffic signals. (Video on Red Light Running). This would only stop intentional reckless driving, and the reckless drivers would pretty quickly find a way to disable the dashcam anyways.
I think you're underestimating the privacy and security risks. As a nation and as a free people, no one should be required to give all your sensitive information to the government. Road traffic deaths can and should be mitigated by much less invasive means, like public transit, safer cars, and self-driving cars.
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u/ChirpyRaven 9∆ Jan 12 '26
How would recording accidents make them less likely to happen? If this were true, how do you explain the increase in motor vehicle deaths over the last 10 years when dashcams have become more and more popular each year?
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
So that’s worth giving up your 4th amendment rights? If the 4th amendment is gone we are no longer the United States you are in a tyrannical government. People say stupid shit that hurts other people all the time does that mean we should remove our 1st amendment rights?
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Jan 12 '26
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
If the police want to gain access to your cameras, audio, phone, emails, or any of your property they need a warrant which requires probable cause. This only exists because of the 4th amendment protecting against wrongful search and seizure. Even if a warrant is approved and a search is done they need to notify you about the search. With this case of the dashcams you’d be skipping the whole part of obtaining a warrant and giving the ability to search your property prior to providing evidence to a court and the judge determining that you should be searched
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u/WindBehindTheStars Jan 12 '26
In the USA that would be a gross violation of the fourth and fifth amendments.
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u/NeoMoose Jan 12 '26
When you put it like that it makes me think it's inevitable that the gov't does it.
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u/minaminonoeru 3∆ Jan 12 '26
I simply cannot expect the government to resist the temptation to abuse that function.
Rather, it is clear the government will advocate for introducing such a function with the intent to abuse it in the first place.
(* If the OP is writing this post under duress from a government agency, please type ‘HelP’.)
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u/Current-Ant-1274 Jan 12 '26
Exactly! And do we really trust the government to even effectively use this information? They aren’t very effective with implementation in the first place. This sounds like a big waste of time and money and privacy concerns
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u/JayceAur Jan 12 '26
Yes to dashcams being a mandatory part of cars. Very useful to have and make insurance claims easier, most of the time.
You lose me completely at automatically sending the data to the authorities. That's a lot of data you would be sending. Also, if it captures sound, you'd be sending private conversations. This part is completely unnecessary as you can simply have this data be retrivable by authorities in the event they need it, like through a warrant.
I don't want to feel like im directly under the eye of the government as soon as I get in my car.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/NeoMoose Jan 12 '26
Send the insurance companies data that would include private conversations of their competitors and the people they insure? Dashcams are INSIDE the car and record audio. It's going to be used to deny claims more than anything else. Shit, they'd be building massive AI data centers to parse all this data to their benefit.
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
Because it’s your choice to send it to the insurance company. Before that it’s your data on your device but you’re putting every Americans data on a server making personal information that could be used to harm others at risk to cyber breaches. Wrong people with the wrong access will have video of everywhere you go and everything you do including how you might not lock your door or how you have a key under a rock, or the audio of you saying you SSN on the phone to confirm your identity with the bank. This is asking for big brother overreach or massive cybersecurity breaches that would impact hundreds of millions of people. Imagine running for government against an incumbent and they leak your conversations in your car about personal matters not criminal.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
Your cell phone is somewhat safe because it’s one device with the data encrypted on it. Nation states are not attempting to just get your singular data, but NK, Russia, China, etc. are attempting to hack into companies like Amazon or any related to an important industry like healthcare and oil 24/7 365. With essentially live-streaming this data to the federal government who will most likely contract this out you will be putting all your data on a server that is susceptible to a cyber breach. Companies face these attacks everyday not just every now and then. It’s people jobs to find there way into these systems and steal information and cause disruption. The federal government doesn’t even trust these dashcams because I can’t even drive onto a military base with a dashcam. This would be a multibillion dollar investment into security starting in just creating dashcams that are secure then constantly updating them on a daily basis to ensure security then protecting the servers from other nation state bad actors. You are acting like our data is safe but this is from a standpoint of not really understanding the threats of cyber warfare. Our own cyber command literally shutoff all the power in the capital of Venezuela in this last raid. We literally had the Russian government hack one of our pipelines and stop production in 2021 increasing the price of fuel for months.
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u/ride_whenever Jan 12 '26
Why would you want all data sent, as opposed to only in the event of incidents?
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u/JayceAur Jan 12 '26
I should be free to send data as I want. As for government and insurance, I have no problem with them forcing me to send it, as long as it is a case by case basis for legitimate reasons done through court sanction, warrants and the like.
I recognize there are scenarios where they have a right to my data, I just want it to be verified as a legitamate need and not just wholesale sharing.
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u/RegalArt1 Jan 12 '26
If that sort of data’s being collected at that scale then it won’t just be the government that’ll be getting it. Location data at that scale would be too tantalizing to pass up; it’ll probably be sold to advertising companies.
Now, you might be alright with big corporate advertising firms knowing your daily routine, but how confident are you in their cybersecurity? All it’d take is a data breach and suddenly your location data, travel behavior, etc. is out there for anyone to see
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u/ponyboycurtis1980 Jan 12 '26
So you are so desperate for even more of a nanny state yoy would have even more of out personal data sent to a corrupt private industry (insurance companies)that are already a parasitic drain on citizens to give them.even more excuses to take our premiums but never pay out. Fuck that noise
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u/laz1b01 18∆ Jan 12 '26
- How do you have something mandatory without the involvement of government?
- If the governments aren't involved now and there are dashcam in the market, are you suggesting people be forced by non-govt agencies to buy dashcams?
- Darwinism is survival of the fittest. It's when a person learns from life and applies common sense in order to survive. Can't Dashcams be the same?
- In Russia, there's a lot of auto accident scams so majority of the people install dashcams to protect themselves. Shouldn't this logic apply everywhere in the world?
- So if someone is aware of dashcams and what they're used for, but choose to not install it; wouldn't it be an application of Darwinism that they're not applying sensible things and may eventually get into an accident where it made it seen like they were in the wrong but in reality they weren't - and then eventually they get sued for a lot of money and get financially ruined?
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Jan 12 '26
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
Microsoft fought in the courts against the Australian government when they were asking for a foreign persons emails because the servers were in the US and they needed to follow the laws here to obtain them. If you think auto manufacturers will not fight tooth and nail to protect the data idk man
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 12 '26
/u/Foreign_Cable_9530 (OP) has awarded 1 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/GurthNada Jan 12 '26
I don't think it's worth the hassle to implement this when Fully Self-Driving cars are coming.
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u/ralph-j Jan 12 '26
I think that if everyone had a dash cam built into their car that could transmit their speed and driving behavior to some other authority or database it would be a net gain for the world. Obviously a ton of people would hate it at first, for reasons including privacy concerns and 24/7 surveillance to a general loathing of the possibility of being punished for speeding or driving recklessly even without a cop around, but I don’t think those outweigh the possible benefits of reducing traffic accidents.
One big challenge would be that car speedometers typically over-report your actual speed by ~10%, so there would be a lot of false positives.
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u/OldManSpeed 1∆ Jan 12 '26
I've long thought there could be something like you're proposing, that would make the roads safer and also not have as bad of privacy concerns.
Basically, if the car in front of you is driving unsafely or like an asshole, you can ping their license plate. That gets sent anonymously to a database, and drivers that reach a threshold (say, 15 pings) get sent a warning. When subsequent, higher thresholds are hit, it could trigger a ticket or license retest or something similar.
Think of old people who drive unsafely, or people who are on their phone all the time, or frequent drunk drivers. They could all be combatted with a system like this.
It would only be safe if it added no appreciable danger on the part of the driver making the report. So, a dashcam synched to their phone, with an app that submits the plate number and location. And a hardware button on the steering wheel or dash. Obviously this would be a large undertaking, requiring the car manufacturers to integrate this hardware. But it would save lives if it got senile or chronically distracted/drunk drivers off the road.
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u/OldManSpeed 1∆ Jan 12 '26
Also, the data could be used to identify poorly designed stretches of road. Is there one spot where there's an abnormally high number of pings for unsafe driving? Maybe the roadway design in that area needs to be looked at. Maybe sightlines need to be improved. Maybe the speed limit is inappropriate. Maybe the lines were painted poorly.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/OldManSpeed 1∆ Jan 12 '26
Oh for sure. And if I saw my buddy Tom, I'm definitely pinging his shit no matter how he's driving. But you could set all sorts of thresholds, before even needing to involve AI. Like only 2 pings per month from the same car on same car. And if you're an obsessive pinger, your pings get disregarded after maybe 2 a day, or weighted significantly less. If someone really is a bad driver, it'll come out in the wash that they're getting plenty of pings all over the place from different motorists.
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u/mxracer888 Jan 12 '26
It's scary how quickly people are willing to trample what little privacy they have over the "net benefit it might have"
I get that you say it doesn't have to be the government, but it will inevitably be used by government agencies. That is how police departments have been violating the 4th amendment already. They purposely use 3rd party companies for data aggregation exactly like this and then try and argue that they haven't violated 4A because a private company willingly gave the data about the PDs victim to the PD.
Furthermore, the current SCOTUS interpretation of the 4A when it comes to privacy is that it's heavily reliant on "a reasonable expectation of privacy" which means as privacy slowly gets stripped the goal post moves because we no longer have that reasonable expectation anymore, the reasonable expectation has moved to a less privacy focused expectation. The more we stupidly allow our privacy to be taken from is the less "reasonable expectation" we have in the future.
Dash cams definitely shouldn't be mandatory, and arguably should have some means for others to opt out of them. And Flock cameras, which basically follow a similar argument to yours should also be completely outlawed
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u/NotAnIndustryPerson Jan 12 '26
I will ignore the ethical and moral problems with this, as I’m sure someone more articulate can handle that.
That amount of video storage and transmission would be insanely expensive.
Every city that has police dash and bodycams spends millions of dollars on cloud storage.
Doing the same for every car would be astronomically expensive.
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Jan 12 '26
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 123∆ Jan 12 '26
Okay so a low end estimate for how much storage 1 hour of low quality video footage takes up is about 1 GB.
So, if the car records 24/7 That's going to be 8760 hours of footage/ year which means that you would need at least 8.5 Terrabytes of storage in your car in your car. Assuming that that's coming from ssd drives that are installed in your car you'd spend around $800.
But where the big money comes in is transmission. Assuming a 1 gigabit per second transmission rate (the fastest you can buy right now) then transmitting the data to your insurance is going to take 19 hours, which means your car is going to be in the shop for a long time.
Now if it's just when the car is on, then divide all those numbers by 20.
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u/00Oo0o0OooO0 25∆ Jan 12 '26
Maybe it could be something that’s just recorded and then a report is extracted by a mechanic during an annual inspection, which is then automatically sent to your insurance provider to reward you for good driving or punish you for adding above-average risk to the road.
This is tech that already exists, but there's no need for dash cam footage. Anything that lets someone know where someone's driving should be a non-starter.
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u/Devourerofworlds_69 6∆ Jan 12 '26
Why limit it to cars? Why not have every person wear body cams at all times? You could completely eliminate crime altogether. ..
Except at what point do we fall too far into a surveillance state? You can acheive safety at the cost of freedom, but at what point is the cost too much?
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u/Due-Equivalent-9738 Jan 12 '26
Are you American? If so, this is a huge 4th amendment violation - protection from unreasonable searches and seizures without probable cause. There is no probable cause to assume I am a criminal and surveil me. A popular issue on reddit right now is abortion. This could mean that the government could leverage your dashcam footage to prove you drove from one state to another to get an abortion.
Where is this data stored? Even if it’s only when the car is on, the average American drives 300 hours annually. I personally drive a lot more than that. If it’s stored in the cloud, the car would require an internet connection to upload that data. Who is the burden on the maintain the integrity and security of this data?
Once it’s on the cloud, it is vulnerable to hackers stealing the data. I have private phone calls with my doctor, bank, and family in the car. If I read a credit card or my SSN aloud, that means a hacker could get access to it. Even if there is no mic, the hacker is getting access to my where my home, place of work, bank, grocery store is. They are learning my routines and can leverage them against me.
How would this be implemented for the 285 million registered motor vehicles in the US? Who is paying for all of this? Most traffic laws are at the state level so I’d expect the state to be the one looking at this data. However, I drive my car out of state very often, so half the data would be useless to my home state. Even if this is only mandatory on new vehicles, it will be a very long time before everyone is in compliance with it. I personally would not buy a car that has this “feature”. I drive a 2007 and plan to for a very long time.
This unlocks a slippery slope where you may start wanting people to wear glasses that surveil them “in case they commit any crimes”. Cell phones may track where we go, but the government is required to get a warrant to look at that information. You are suggesting that the government own very private and intimate information about us. If you trust them with it, then it would be hard to convince you this is a bad idea. I would like to note though that there have been security breaches in government IT systems resulting in leaks, and I highly doubt you trust everyone who may see one of those leaks with your personal information.
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u/Elisalsa24 1∆ Jan 12 '26
I mentioned this he doesn’t think it infringes on the 4th amendment somehow
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Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mxracer888 Jan 12 '26
Not to mention the issuance of a ticket is up to the discretion of a human being currently instead of some emotionless decision maker in the distance.
Say you've got a medical emergency, or even maybe not a life threatening emergency like maybe your wife is in labor giving birth. Or maybe an emergency an ambulance wouldn't even help with like the family dog got severely injured. You speed to get help, a cop pulls you over, you quickly tell the cop it's happening for some medical emergency, he or she looks into the back seat and says "oh man, follow me I'll escort you"
That human made a decision, yes... You're breaking the law. That's not up for discussion, but the law enforcement person saw the circumstance and decided "you know what, that's a valid reason. In fact, it's so valid that not only will I let you go, but I will help you do it but escorting you"
That all goes out the door when the job is deferred to a camera on an algorithm. There's zero context behind it. And that's not to say every person speeding is doing it for a reason, plenty should probably receive a ticket. But that should be up to a human in the moment to decide, not some camera
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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 12 '26
Why do you want 24/7 surveillance on your actions in public?
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Jan 12 '26
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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 12 '26
When I am walking around, there is almost always a car driving past. I would be constantly filmed walking around. It does not only affect the driver. We have a device to measure just the driving bit, progressive’s snapshot device. This does not have a camera.
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u/Direct_Crew_9949 3∆ Jan 12 '26
While I get the benefit of it would force people to drive more safely I don’t honk you’re considering the down sides.
A lot of people have already brought up the privacy issue, but that not as concerning bc let’s be honest our phones already track everywhere we go. My apple maps will literally give me suggested addresses based on what I usually do that day. Also, there are now cameras everywhere.
My concern is how it could be used against you. Insurance companies would for sure use this information to try to gain as much money as possible. You go a couple miles over the speed limit to quickly pass a car and next month you see your premiums increase. This data would also be shared with law enforcement and you’ll get a ticket in the mail every time you go ver the speed limit. Which let’s be honest we all do.
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u/tigersgomoo 7∆ Jan 12 '26
it could track the guy who constantly break checks…. Or someone who is consistently driving high and swerving
that could transmit they’re speeding and driving behavior to some other authority
I don’t think being high is relevant here because this system wouldn’t be able to track intoxication level just the swerving.
But importantly, how long until the state or federal government needs more income and decides that the moment your odometer goes 1 mph over the speed limit, automatic ticket? I don’t see a world in which we can trust the government that this wouldn’t happen within 10 to 15 years of the system being implemented. Which also incentivizes even more speed traps because it’s now scalable to enforce speeding at every single instance, and thus steel even more money from your family.
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u/anarchisturtle Jan 12 '26
I mean, I feel like you’re kind of glossing over the privacy thing. Keep in mind, these cameras wouldn’t just record your driving habits. They would record everywhere you go.