Copyright jalopnik
Riley Walz is a software developer who engages in interesting social experiments. For example, he created Bop Spotter, which eavesdrops on San Francisco's Mission District and publishes playlists of what music the Shazam app hears people playing as they pass by. Walz has never had a parking ticket and doesn't even own a car. But his roommate has both, which is what brought this to his attention. It didn't take Walz long to figure out the algorithm the city uses to automatically issue citation numbers, which was the key to unlock a treasure trove of information. He explains the details of how he did it on his website. This was not a hack or data breach; the information Walz accessed was publicly accessible, and it appears that he violated no laws in doing so. However, the City of San Francisco was still displeased. It quickly figured out the method Walz was using to scrape citation data and shut it down four hours after the site went live. He briefly looked for other ways to obtain the data to keep the site up, but soon gave up the cat-and-mouse game. The site remains up, but is not functional for its original purpose. The main page now says, "In rare lightning speed, the SF government changed their site within hours of this site going live. I can't get data from it anymore." SFMTA provided the following statement to The San Francisco Standard and Wired: Citations are a tool to ensure compliance with parking laws, which help keep our streets safe and use our limited curb space efficiently and fairly. We welcome creative uses of technology to encourage legal parking, but we also want to make sure that our employees are able to do their jobs safely, and without disruption."
