A software engineer named Riley Walz has built a website that scrapes the data from the City of San Francisco website, allowing him to track issued parking tickets in real-time and the location where the officers wrote them. The information is readily available on the Find My Parking Cops web app, and uses an interface similar to Apple’s Find My app, making it quick and easy to use.
Overlaid on a top-down view of San Francisco, you get a list of active officers at the moment, plus a leaderboard showing the total value of the tickets a particular officer has issued for the current week. Walz shared his creation on X — A few hours later, the City took down the website date, briefly rendering his creation useless. Nevertheless, he was able to create a workaround, restoring the functionality of the tracking site, at least for now.
According to Walz, he was inspired to create the page after his roommate received a parking ticket. The website where you pay the penalty also shows a full copy of the citation, as long as you have its number. When you input the correct information, you’ll see all the details related to the parking offence, including the make, color, and license plate of the offending vehicle, the reason for the ticket, and the issuing officer’s initials.
One other roadblock that he encountered was the ticket number — at the moment, the system lists nearly a billion tickets, but he thinks that this is nowhere near the real number of parking violations in San Francisco. When he added one to the ticket that his friend had, the San Francisco website returned an error. But after some more experimentation and digging around, he discovered the tickets were numbered by increments of 11, except for when the last digit is 6, by which you add 4 to get the next ticket number. This pattern allowed him to predict the next parking citation to be issued, making for easier tracking. He was also able to figure out the claim ID, allowing him to pull out all the details of the ticket.
Armed with this information, he created a scraper that copied and stored all the parking tickets as soon as they were created. They then used a borrowed Apple Maps API key to put the data on a map, allowing anyone to see the locations, the number of tickets, as well as the total fines a particular parking cop has issued during their shift. Naturally, this information could be used to avoid parking fines, a benefit Walz himself touts, with users able to see a rough spread of where parking cops might be issuing tickets at any given time.
While not exactly illegal, this shows how easy it can be to gather data from the internet if you know what you’re doing. However, it can also raise some privacy issues, especially since the parking tickets often have personal data on them. The City of San Francisco definitely needs to secure its parking ticket system, but it also needs to ensure that citizens can retain easy access to the payment portal to settle their violations. In the meantime, this map is available for anyone to see, that is, until San Francisco fixes their system and makes it just a little bit more secure.
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