Spying on your friends, neighbors, and family? Nothing to see here, just old Soviet style repression tactics.
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I've filed a few reports, and I found the process frustrating and error-prone. The forms are fiddly, there's way too much information that needs to be copied down from the video by hand, you have to use a third-party app to take a timestamped video and a different app to compress it before uploading, and approximately none of it can be done on your phone — the device you probably used to record your video in the first place.
I built Idle Reporter to make filing complaints into a five-minute process that you can do entirely from your phone.
Idle Reporter uses AI to automatically extract all the required information and screenshots from the video and fill out the form for you. It compresses your video, adds the required screenshots, and uploads the whole thing to DEP. All you have to do is log in, give it a final check, and submit.
The AI features cost me money to run, so I put those behind a subscription ($5.99/month, which can pay for itself after a single report). There's a one-week free trial so you can test it out. All the other features — including a fully-featured timestamp camera, which other apps charge for, and an editor for filling out the forms manually and submitting in a single step — will be free forever, as a service to the community.
The app is iOS-only for now — part of this was an exercise in learning SwiftUI in my spare time.
Check it out on the App Store and let me know what you think!
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-idling-law-report...
Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.
My only beef with the law itself, is that the fines need to be income-linked - otherwise it’s only illegal if you’re poor.
1. the issues lies in the bounty hunting laws not the app. Change the law, the app goes away.
2. I’d rather bad laws get struck from the books, rather than lurking mostly un-enforced in the toolbox of police to weaponize. E.g. jaywalking. A crime made up by car companies to shift the blame from cars+drivers to pedestrians, mostly un-enforced except when cops want an excuse to id/frisk/hassle a young person or visible minority.