Sunday, February 27, 2011

Student uses smartphone to beat trumped-up speeding ticket

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Police car pulling someone over

Kudos to wily kids and their cop-busting gadgets:

A student describes how he was able to get out a speeding ticket by whipping out his Android.

The cop cited him for going over 40 mph in a 25 zone, which he was too frazzled to contest at the time. After he had cooled down and parked his car later, he remembered that he had been running the My Tracks app by Google which records your GPS info and speed. Pulling up the data, he found that he hadn't been speeding. When his court date arrived, he plead not guilty, presented his GPS data, and successfully got out of the ticket. Nice!

Of course, the logical outcome of this story is that cops will now demand to see drivers’ smartphones whenever they’re pulled over, after which their owners will find that their contents been “accidentally” wiped clean.

You’d think I kid, but expectations about police professionalism standards have sunk low enough for this to be a perfectly conceivable occurrence to me.

(via The Agitator)