This Russian app wants to shame drivers into parking more responsibly

There’s apparently a problem in Russia where car owners park their vehicles wherever they like. This has resulted in vehicles parked on sidewalks and pretty much anywhere with an empty space. Since we’re not from Russia, we guess we can’t really verify this for ourselves, but Russian news website, The Village, has decided that this was a problem big enough for them to sit up and do something about it. They have since created an app that will allow users to snap photos of the offending vehicles, and the app will then be able to recognize the model of the vehicle along with its license plate. After which users will be able to upload the photo along with its location.

Granted this can already be done with the native camera app built into the iPhone, but what makes The Village’s solution so unique is that the offending vehicle will start appearing as an annoying popover “ad” in the browsers of people living in that area, who are being targeted using their IP addresses. The goal here is to “shame” the parker by having his/her vehicle splashed across the browsers of their friends, family, co-workers, bosses, etc, in hopes that they will not repeat their mistake again.

Is this app for real or is it merely a parody? Either way it’s a pretty unique idea and an interesting one at that! Of course there are other methods of dealing with such inconsiderate drivers, such as alerting the authorities to tow the car away, but we guess given the day and age we live in, why shouldn’t there be an app for that? In the mean time while we’re trying to figure out if this app is for real, be sure to check out the video above for a “demonstration”.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Apps