Lime bikes dumped in canals and rivers 'posing pollution risk'
The Canal and River Trust says eight or nine are being pulled out a week in one city alone.
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Install 360° cameras, film those assholes and make them pay for retrieval.
Sounds nice until you think about the implications for everyone that doesn't vandalize or destroy these bikes. I'm most certainly not going to rent one if it has 360° surveillance capabilities.
The recording nedds to be saved only when the accelerometer detects the bike being thrown.
Yes totally. I would trust any company to always do this the right way. And there would never be an incident where some footage gets leaked, or passed around the office. "Oops there must have been a malfunction".
Yes like Amazon AND Google haven't been caught saving private conversations that their voice assistants recorded totally unintentionally even though they weren't triggered. They did totally say "sorry" and won't do it again, ever. Right? Right?
Sure, if you live in a shithole country like the US or a wanna-be-shithile country like the UK, companies can just trample you privacy. But in the EU, privacy is protected and you can easily introduce legislation that any non-government surveillance needs to be set up in a way that makes automatic permanent surveillance impossible.
I live in the EU. The violations of Google and Amazon I mentioned also happened in the EU. Feel free to look up the repercussions on those. Having rules is irrelevant if there is no way to actually enforce them, or at least verify them. It would be doable (maybe not quite "easy") to have that verifiable, but there is no system or law in place for it as it stands right now.
You can trust them companies that would put surveillance equipment like that in their stuff to not abuse it, that's your call. I just won't use it. In quite a few EU countries this wouldn't be allowed anyway, btw. At least not with current laws in regards to video recording in and around traffic. For example dash cams are still not fully legal in Germany, and only very limited recording (and storing) of footage is permitted.
Sounds like a lot of technology on something that can and will be trashed by the public.
So constant 360° surveillance?
You only need to save the recording when the bike's accelerometer detects the bike being thrown.
...or have decent security on them that can't be broken by a 12yo.
The problem is it's done by folk that don't pay and probably covering their face. The fact the company thinks it's cheaper to lose bikes than pay rent for land for stations to secure the bikes between customers is the problem. They don't care.
The modern bikes need an account with valid fiscal info to unlock. There is no way to "not pay".
Yeah there is, they can be bump started really easily, you literally just lift the rear wheel then start moving forward, then put the wheel back down and jump on, I've seen kids do it, it takes zero skill. In the meadows these days I hear a lime alarm pretty much every day.
This is a problem that's already been solved, check out bicing in Barcelona and how that works. This really is a problem of legislation.
There absolutely is, people break the disabling mechanism. I've had two go past me today with the obvious clack-clack-clack-clack of it.
You just bump start them, there's nothing to break from the outside, you just lift the back wheel and start moving, then drop the wheel and it'll keep going, but with an alarm and a clacking.
Check out how bicing in Barcelona works, no cameras and surveillance, but you literally cannot retrieve a bike without an account and the app because they are physically locked in racks. It's a brilliant system and ours can be easily fixed with a little legislation.
Fuck that. Lime's business model promotes this sort of littering. These things are left in the most random places and it's a hazard. Just pull them off the streets entirely.
