I am not looking forward to a future filled with this type of surveillance.
What we're seeing here is surveillance of a public area, used for a clear goal, which is proportional (because texting while driving is insane) and is reviewed by humans, and has clear avenues for escalation when it makes a mistake.
The scary parts are the parts that such a system is capable of, but which are not made public. For one the article doesn't mention whether the data is used for anything else or if it is ever deleted. It's also not clear if there are plans to use it for less serious offences, or if the human review is going to be removed at some point.
I'm inclined to agree, but I would also love to see more detailed analysis. It is easy for everyone to jump on this particular bandwagon (I have found very few people willing to say that texting while driving is no big deal), but at the same time I see a lot of texting while driving happening every day. And while we do know it contributes to accidents, driving remains a relatively safe activity statistically given how dangerous it seems.
It's a little bit similar to the 'think of the children' argument, and it makes me uncomfortable when we use such justifications for massively increasing surveillance in a way that seems disproportionate to the problem we are trying to solve.
Is it massively increasing surveillance? UK is full of speed cameras[1] and automatic number plate recognition cameras[2].
"Vehicle movements on UK roads are recorded by a network of 11,000 cameras that read around 60 million number plates daily."
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_speed_limit_enforcement_i...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...