This is a complex one. On one hand, cracking down on distracted driving is absolutely a good thing. Thousands of people are killed by negligent drivers every ye

This is a complex one. On one hand, cracking down on distracted driving is absolutely a good thing. Thousands of people are killed by negligent drivers every year, and every single one is an unnecessary tragedy. But, there need to be some guardrails on this program. The UK police have a habit of keeping massive amounts of data around for years, and storing it inappropriately. I have no doubt all of the images this system takes will end up on a public S3 bucket or left open on an insecure email server within the next decade. For the Americans/Canadians, also consider that there are already a LOT of speed cameras in the UK already -- far more than there are across the ocean. The only new thing here is that instead of connecting it to a radar system, it's using computer vision to decide to fine somebody or not. It's new technology, but not really a paradigm change for the culture.