SCARP - Surveillance Camera Avoidance Route Planner
Back in February, I made this post announcing that I was giving up work on a routing app that avoided surveillance cameras. I thought it was useful, but concluded that it might make more sense for a more experienced dev to take over. Earlier this month, I found that someone in the form of myself using opencode.
This iteration actually kinda sorta works. It only works for the great state of Ohio, and I haven't thrown the code for this on Github yet as so much of it was vibecoded. If you feel like this would be helpful for you somewhere else in the world right now, please let me know. In the meantime, even though it's still pretty limited, it's leaps and bounds above my last version.
Here's how it works. You plug in your two locations. Let's say you're a faculty member at Miami University and want to go get some ice cream at Young's Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs. So you pull up your map:
Sure, you can grab that fasted route. OR, you can avoid nine of those cameras by taking the extra three minutes to go the scenic route:
Not too shabby, but...well actually that's still pretty shabby. If you really want to take things to the next level, you can always switch to the satellite view and make notes of how to avoid the remaining cameras:
You can either cut and paste the directions or print them out with notes of where to avoid cameras:
As a disclaimer, I'm not sure how long I can keep this running right now, so please view it more as a proof of concept than a fully functional tool. Ideally, I'll need smarter people and/or some funding to make this reliable and more helpful.
this is useful, but the privacy model matters as much as the route model.
if the app ever stores raw origin/destination traces centrally, you've just moved the surveillance from the street to the database. for places where people already think about safety first, i'd rather see local-only routing or at least aggressive log minimization.