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Comment by heezo | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I’m Jim the CEO of Meter Feeder. We are excited to announce our product and that we are participating in Y Combinator W16. My co-founder and I are passionate about the pains of parking. We want to create a solution that is easy and elegant for everyone. Please let us know if you have any questions.

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You collect a lot of data about people - their location (and therefore travel patterns), license plate etc. What's your privacy policy with regards to location data collected? Will you disclose if your database is requested by the authorities? How long is the data stored for? Will you be monetizing that data? Your FAQ doesn't address this.

Great question. We only store the data the the municipality needs to enforce tickets. All personal data is stored directly on the phone.

How do you handle different rates for different zones? Does the city hand you the zoning information + coordinates? In general, I'm curious how you work with the various municipalities.

We work with them to set up the initial zones (GIS coordinates are easy to find online). And there is an administrative dashboard that we provide the municipal director of parking where they can adjust the rates. It usually takes about 10 minutes for one of our team members to set up a new city.

10 minutes? That's pretty impressive! Next question: Are you in Chicago?

Unfortunately, no. However, we are excited to move into all of the places that can't afford Park Chicago.

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