this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
930 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
87550 readers
3365 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Yup. I'm not surprised at Americans being opposed to it, but here in Australia we have cameras that detect phone usage while driving. The fine itself is issued after a person verifies the photo. And I am fully supportive of it. Driving a motor vehicle is an insanely fucking dangerous task. If your full attention isn't on it, you deserve to receive a fine. Keep the phone stowed securely in a holder, or away in your pocket.
The freedom of me to be able to make my trip on foot or bike—or even in my own car—without being killed by you far outweighs any idea of freedom you might have to be able to have your phone on your lap.
Australians and Canadians have some pretty bad entitlement when it comes to driving. But neither of us are anywhere near as entitled as Americans. Discussions like the one in this thread make that very clear. !fuckcars@lemmy.world
I am not a fan of the all-seeing panopticon, personally. That said, I personally feel much more entitled to good public transit and walkable neighborhoods than to a car.
I have heard bad things about how Flock works in particular with respect to tracking people, abuse of police powers, etc. But it was not involved in the event in this article, and it is not the only way of doing mobile phone detection.
My state uses a company called Acusensus, which only captures images for long enough to run the AI over them and then deletes all those without even being seen by a human if no offence is detected, among other privacy safeguards. The humans who do review the ones that AI detects as an offence don't even get to see where or when the alleged offence took place.