Can an App Make Bike Lanes Safer?

Can an app make bike lanes safer? That's the question raised by this article, which describes an app called Safe Lanes that's being used in San Francisco to report violations directly to the city.

On the surface it seems like a good idea. But there are concerns about privacy issues.

Amidst this burgeoning landscape of technology designed to maximize opportunities for urban narcing, a bike-lane-defender app stands out as a beneficial means of evening the balance of power between cyclists and drivers. But does it also get us one more step down the slippery slope to a self-surveillance society?

“There’s been this cultural shift of normalizing that it’s OK to be taking photos and videos of other people in public,” said Rachel Thomas, the founding director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco’s Data Institute, and the co-founder of the online coding school fast.ai. The illusion of privacy in the public sphere may have always been an illusion, but with many more eyes and lenses trained on the streets, the age-old practice of “being seen” can evolve quickly into being shared, and being stored. And perhaps being unfairly tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.