Last year I got a parking ticket for lingering too long in a limited zone. Parking tickets are not sufficient reason to declare war on a city’s thinly veiled vehicular taxation scheme for the absentminded. And yet I wanted to.
So instead of dutifully filling out the online payment form, I started searching for ways to make my payment submission equally tedious and arbitrary. I envisioned mailing $60 worth of pennies originally intended for the Coinstar. But I was stymied: They’d hidden the physical mailing address on their website.
What they failed to hide, however, was just about everything else. After clicking around, I discovered unfettered access to all the other tickets issued through the city’s online payment system, complete with time, date, car data, and the name of the parking enforcement officer who issued each ticket. Technically, parking tickets are public data. But these weren’t just a few lines of data: They were photographs of everyone’s cars, value of the tickets, license plates — anything a person would need to conduct open-source intelligence on the ticketed and ticketers alike.
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Source: War On The Rocks