Up to now, all we had to worry about was official police speed traps but now a new phone app can record the speed of any road user.

New App Turns Your Phone into a Speed Camera

As if the streets of our cities aren't already filled with enough cameras to track our every movement and the open country roads blighted with speed cameras to trap the unwary, a new Android 'phone app can turn anyone into a mobile speed cop.

The new app, called Speedcam Anywhere, can identify a vehicle and measure its speed and it seems not everyone is happy about the development.

The app is described as an ‘AI system that can accurately and verifiably measure vehicle speeds using a mobile phone camera’.

The app takes a short video clip of a car passing before using the registration plate to cross-reference it against the DVLA (the British vehicle licensing department) database to identify it. It then measures the velocity with the length of the wheelbase to calculate its speed of travel, before providing a report showing evidence of its speed and the speed limit of the area in which it was taken.

If the data it records is not legally admissible and no fines can be issued because of it, it's not a too-large leap of imagination to visualise some irate motorist sending the resulting report to the police just to cause trouble. A worrying quote on the Speedcam Anywhere website says the following: "Speedcam Anywhere do not ourselves pass on any information to the Police. We may be requested to do so at some future date."

More worrying is the ability of the user to identify vehicles and make note of the information about the vehicle and rider/driver. In this age of spiralling bike theft, particularly in the UK, the last thing we need to do is give the thieves more information.

The backlash against the developers, believed to originate in Silicon Valley, is such that they have gone to ground, although they have released a statement:

“We’re getting quite abusive emails. It’s a Marmite product - some people think it’s a good idea, some people think that it turns us into a surveillance state,” the UK Guardian newspaper quotes one of the app developers as saying.

“There are 20,000 serious injuries on the roads every year – how can we reduce them? And the way we reduce them is we make a deterrent to speeding.”

This misses the point that speed in itself does not cause accidents. Speed in the wrong places or situations causes the accidents and to get pissed at someone going well over the speed limit on an open road in good conditions is not necessarily a problem, other than in the eyes of the law.

The app is not perfect, however, gaining a one-and-a-half star rating on Google Play and being criticised for a lack of accuracy and bugs that still need to be ironed out.

But it's a step in the wrong direction for personal freedom, encouraging normal citizens to think they can take the law into their own hands. Responsibility on the roads is everyone's business but not to the extent that we can assume that we can judge someone else's behaviour.