An old parking meter and a Pi make beautiful music together An enterprising engineer has turned an old parking meter into a jukebox using a Pi Zero 2 and some open source code. Reddit user Connect_Use2528 began the project when their wife asked them to paint a decommissioned parking meter baby pink. The lock was drilled out and the pondering began. Could this old bit of urban …
Its possible that the regard the revenue from reselling access to your phone and so life through their 'app' is at least as valuable as the revenue cut they get for the actual parking charges.
(I can't figure out why they'd find someone like me interesting, its not that I respond to any adverts, but I expect fits probably connected to surveillance pricing.)
I don't think the surveillance is worth more. My belief is that one of the reasons why the surveillance economy is so incredibly bad for privacy is that each act of surveillance yields only miniscule revenue, so the companies doing surveillance do it absolutely as much as possible.
The reason I think the surveillance earns very little money per privacy violation is that I believe that advertising targeting is very neatly their only revenue stream. Ads make on the order of micro pennies per display, so commercial surveillance has to be making a fraction of that.
I think the survailence is worth more as an aggrigated whole for corperate inteligence companies looking at you st ives group...
The add revenue is just to make it seem benign, a side hussle if you will.
Think about it, all the location data, payment data etc of hundereds of thousands of people, thats alot of data.
They wouldn't do it if there was very little return an analog token for a parking meter does not need huge network connectivity and pays itself of in a year or so
Parking used to be free in the road outside, but a couple of years ago bays were marked out and a payment machine installed. I wasn't much concerned because I have my own free parking space under the building, but when visitors arrived with their own vehicle I moved mine outside and attempted to buy a ticket for it.
Some kind soul had glued the coin slot shut.
This actually got me off the subsequent fine.
-A.
More likely the scammers who stuck up the phoney QR codes that link to fraudulent copies of the parking app website are the ones who sabotage the pay machines.
Doesn't need saying here - but worth pointing out as a reminder... ANY QR code that's physically accessible to the public is a target for a scammer to make use of by sticking up a replacement QR code over the original. If you have to find a new parking app, do it by searching the company name and making damned sure you're on the correct website, or downloading the correct app, before entering any information whatsoever.
Yeah, it's superfluous intermediation fomented by the co-occurence of idle hands and tech progress imho (void-chaos plus lock-in moat envy)
(some) Human nature abhors a vacuum of enshitificating complexification it seems, and so seeks to immediately fill efficient practical tools with layers of bloat, forms, intermediaries, phone-apps, and whathaveyounot, fostering the spread of paradoxical Catch-22 environments (at least).
It's no wonder then that 'advances' in IT so commonly result in decreased productivity growth ... ;(
At my local* beach they have removed all the QR codes to avoid the 'risk' of miscreants overlaying dodgy QR Codes on the posters.
So now we have people walking up to the Ticket Machine, reading the URL off the poster and 'switching off all external sensors while trying to complete the 'Parking App' process'.
This means that the Ticket machine is blocked by people (plural) tapping away on their phone, completely oblivious to the people who are trying to get close enough to the Ticket machine to actually use it by swiping their 'National Trust' card. !!!
Literally, the people walk up to the Ticket machine, read the URL and stop dead wherever they are standing, usually within 2 feet of the machine Display then 'flat lining' while they use the 'Parking App' !!!
This is young & old alike ... a complete lack of thought for anyone else who has just parked and is trying to be law abiding by getting a parking Ticket/voucher.
:)
* == less than a parsec and more than a mile away !!!
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