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The alternative to this solution is literally a clipboard and excel that doesn't really work. Allowing parking patrollers to capture photos and coordinates allows secretaries to avoid sometimes violent confrontations and I'm happy about that.
As for oppressing poor people, the great majority of people who I've seen get towed thanks to record keeping by EasyALPR are parking at commercial business parks. These are out in the suburbs and serve everything from medical offices to joe schmoe SEO company.
The most common violation is people parking in two hour parking for 3+ hours or all day. The parking is free, but it is restricted to two hours. (This is actually a very difficult thing to enforce regularly manually)
At the site I'm thinking of, there is actually longer term parking also free nearby for this facility, but people don't want to walk so they keep seeing if they can get away with abusing the closer short term parking. It is even allowed to move your vehicle to get two more hours for free, they just don't care.
- On the parking side, rich people can pay for parking. Some rich people don't and will get fines, which they can pay. Some poor people will risk getting a ticket so they can not spend that $4. (Someone will respond "just leave earlier and park further away" so let me premptively remind them thar poor people are often, e.g. single parents, working multiple jobs, etc, and don't have the luxury of leaving an hour earlier.) Then that person will get a $200 parking fine and it will be enough to plunge them from scraping by to even riskier practices (not having insurance, bad tires, pay day loans, etc) or even dropping out of university / school.
- Systematic ALPR is extremly effective. Literally everyone infringing will get a ticket if there are enough cars do scanning. Enforcement is often subcontracted out, with an objective criteria of maximising fines.
- Instead of the university administration focusing on priority areas, such as where parking would block exits, it becomes a profit source and they lose sight of what parking is for -- access by staff and students.
- ALPR is often part of an NSA style 'COLLECT ALL' policy. It will record the timestamped location of every vehicle. It is often onsold to data brokers, where it ends up in the hands of car repo services, people stalking their ex-partners, and, indirectly, the government.
- Obviously these things may not concern you, and there are indeed many other engineers who will enable this kind of surveillance. However, I believe there is a market for privacy respecting tech.
- Instead of providing direct ALPR time/location, consider providing just hits where it exceeds the max time period, and deleting scanning logs automatically. Make this part of the value proposition. (Obviously not possible with an SDK product, but consider who the buyers are and the licence terms you provide it under.)
- I dislike illegal parkers, bad drivers and so on as much as the next person, but I won't endorse the beginnings of a Chinese 'social credit' type system.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/ethics-board-one-large...
This is a strong point, and has lots of modern parallels (e.g. "civil forfeiture", gatsos), especially to do with cars. The only thing I'd say is that it's a bit of a stretch to ask the tech to prevent the university from going down this path, whether you blame it on greed or perverse incentives or whatever. I think ideally the parking enforcement system would be fair, simple, and without auxiliary functions like data collection for other purposes. What the administration (mis-)uses it for at that point is on them.
Systems like Signal do not try to solve the problem of govt abuse. Instead, it constrains govts by making them find other ways to conduct surveillance, expanding the task of mass surveillance to one of creating implants for O(n) phones.
It's true that you can't prevent any University from seeking out dark tech patterns, but at least have them make that choice. The community can then have them accept responsibility for that.
Obviously legislation is needed to constrain rempant privacy violation, and we seem a long way off that, especially in the States and the UK. In the mean time, engineers should examine the ethical basis of their work, and consider how it effects their standing in society.
There was I thinking it's a contractual dispute.
So while I operate this tool that enforces a thing, I don't own a car myself and I honestly can't wait for some autonomous fleet-based future where parking lots are torn up and streets are wider and safer for bicycles and alternative transportation vehicles.
Well, instead you might incentiveise it through having car pool car parks that are closer to campus, or at least next to a well lit and preferably sheltered area. Then you could publicise the car pool scheme. You could even have a forum for finding other car poopers, and/or an app. Maybe allow people, with their consent, to be matched by approx origin/destination for easier finding.
If you had a computer science or math department then I'm sure they would have people who could solve the ride matching problem.
Given that there often is a bus or even many buses, the question then might turn to "Why do people prefer their cars to a bus?". And now we're back at the beginning.
The disconnectedness of suburbia is at the heart of this, but essentially insoluble in the short term.