A website designed to track San Francisco’s notoriously unforgiving traffic cops in real time was shut down just four hours after it started, reports The San Francisco Standard. The city claimed officer safety as the reason. It couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the site also tracking the thousands of dollars in fines each officer wrote up daily, providing some short-lived transparency into why San Francisco is the second-highest city in parking ticket revenue.
The website looks much like Apple’s Find My Friends app, which has led many to refer to it as “Find My Parking Cop.” It scraped publicly accessible parking citation data from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, then interpreted and displayed it in an easily accessible format. It displayed the agency’s parking enforcement officers’ locations in close to real time, based on the location of the last ticket each officer wrote. This enabled users to return to their cars to feed the meter before getting a ticket. It may have also enabled some less scrupulous folks to figure out where they could get away with not feeding the meter for a while.
A second tab on the website showed exactly how many tickets and how much revenue each officer was responsible for collecting that week. While the site can no longer collect fresh data, previously scraped data is still available. Each of SFMTA’s parking cops collected thousands of dollars in revenue. Many exceeded $10,000, and one overachiever brought in $20,150 with 192 tickets. It’s good that the state government banned San Francisco’s previous practice of towing cars for parking tickets.
All good things must come to a rapid end
Riley Walz is a software developer who engages in interesting social experiments. For example, he created Bop Spotter, which eavesdrops on San Francisco’s Mission District and publishes playlists of what music the Shazam app hears people playing as they pass by. Walz has never had a parking ticket and doesn’t even own a car. But his roommate has both, which is what brought this to his attention. It didn’t take Walz long to figure out the algorithm the city uses to automatically issue citation numbers, which was the key to unlock a treasure trove of information. He explains the details of how he did it on his website. This was not a hack or data breach; the information Walz accessed was publicly accessible, and it appears that he violated no laws in doing so.
However, the City of San Francisco was still displeased. It quickly figured out the method Walz was using to scrape citation data and shut it down four hours after the site went live. He briefly looked for other ways to obtain the data to keep the site up, but soon gave up the cat-and-mouse game. The site remains up, but is not functional for its original purpose. The main page now says, “In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can’t get data from it anymore.” SFMTA provided the following statement to The San Francisco Standard and Wired:
Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly. We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption.”
