imagine an app that is sort of like a panic button. You get pulled over, you open the app and hit the button which then (depending on your preferences), starts recording/streaming video and audio, locks the phone, and maybe starts recording accelerometer/gps data, etc.

It would need to be thoroughly developed/tested before actually it could be ethically recommended.

What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? unfeasible? Already existing?

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[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You need something that streams to a secure server, so the police can't just delete the video.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Do the police take your dash cam if they pull you over? Does that show on their own badge cam?

Streaming live video takes a lot of bandwidth and connectivity from a car can be intermittent, but maybe it's enough to send a timestamped hash every few seconds, so there is tamper evidence in case of a deletion.

Anyway, deleting video through a dashcam user interface is like deleting a file on a computer: basically a little bit of metadata is overwritten but the underlying data can usually be mostly recovered with filesystem repair or forensic tools. To really delete it for sure you have to either destroy the media or use special tools to overwrite the data blocks. Or just running the camera for a long time (to make sure the freed blocks get re-used) might do it.

You could also stream to another phone or computer tucked away elsewhere in the car, unless you expect the whole car to be seized.