TwoSense helps a user get out of a speeding ticket

Max is a real person, we’ve been friends for years.  He lives in the Netherlands and works as a mechanical engineer for a large company.  He has been a TwoSense user since the first Alpha release and has helped us build the product with his feedback.  This story is about how TwoSense saved Max from having to pay an unjust speeding fine.

Max and a colleague were on a business trip and had to drive from southern Germany back up to the Netherlands after a meeting.  It was a long haul and he and his colleague split driving duties 50/50.  Halfway up the German border they stopped for a rest and a bite to eat, and he and his colleague switched places. The trip concluded without a hitch.  However, months later Max’s company received a speeding ticket forwarded by the car rental agency.  A hidden speed trap had caught their car speeding on camera.  Max’s colleague argued that Max was driving and had to pay the ticket.  Max claimed it was his colleague who was behind the wheel.  Their employer told the two they had to work out who was responsible and pay up. After a little back and forth, Max opened up his TwoSense app and looked at the map for that day.  He compared the location of the ticket with his timeline, and easily showed his colleague that the camera was located on the stretch of highway after the break where the colleague had been driving.  The colleague admitted defeat and paid the ticket.

A while back we talked about how your data could one day be used to represent you in a court of law.  While in this case it didn’t exonerate him in court, It would be an interesting case study to think about what would have happened had his colleague not fessed up.  Or, if Max could prove that the car was actually not speeding at the time that the speed trap claimed it was (in this case they were speeding).  Speeding fines can be ridiculously expensive, and notoriously difficult to dispute once you’ve been slapped with a ticket.  Either way, Max’s ownership of his location data plus his access to analytics, in this case unsupervised machine learning for venue detection, empowered him in this instance.  It also saved him a $50 fine.  With a little bit of imagination, you could see this as the first time that TwoSense earned someone money with their data: a brief preview of great things to come!

-dg