Persecution on Parry's Lane

Some militant cyclist, bristolcyclista, sticks up a video of a journey so uneventful it doesn't merit a mention:



Except, by putting up the video of the car F54NWG, the driver has found a photograph of themselves swearing at the tax-dodger.

Needless to say, this persecuted driver has reacted in the only way left: to complain that placing the video up is a privacy violation, to which youtube react by blocking the video. There's now an updated one with the face blurred out.

The cyclist claims as now that you can only hear the abusive shouting from the passing vehicle, it is hard to identify the driver. Consider this. How does "bristolcyclista" know that the driver doesn't shout and swear like that to everyone? His family? His friends? Anyone he works with? Now anyone in the area of Parry's Lane -that's Stoke Bishop, an "under-documented" region- who has someone walk up to them and shout abuse will know "hey, that's the man in the F54NWG youtube video".

This is persecution.

We know that he's been persecuted by the way that he found and complained about the first video. Perhaps he's felt it necessary -as we have been- to create a google alert with our registration number in, sending us an email when yet another video of our driving appears on line. Alternatively, someone who knew him saw the car, heard the shouting and thought "I know of only one person who swears at people like that as they drive a silver car" -and broke the news. At which point the driver and his acquaintance now know what his driving standard is.

Of course that's an invasion of privacy!

Google's paper, Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning, [Le 2012], showed how they ran an image-feature identification program through still images, each of which was taken from a different youtube video. At the end of the exercise, the computer could take any image and categorise it into "face","body part", "cat" or "other". We suspect that before long, that program would start to recognise from-bicycle driving videos. If that's the case, youtube could just use it as part of its upload process: to identify all cycling-troublemaker videos and then refuse to accept them.

It's only through the application of such technology that our right to drive how we want can be preserved.