Feature suggestion: "Fog of War"?

[dylanrees]

Currently the markers on the map provide information about the presence of cameras. I think that the useful implicit information that comes with this is where there AREN'T cameras. As it currently stands, you can't really tell whether a given area is camera-free or just unexplored by users of the app. Perhaps there should a "fog of war" or other visual cue indicating unexplored areas to help make this distinction.

[milo-trujillo]

It's a tricky problem, because the client has been designed to give the server as little information as possible to protect the anonymity of our users. Clearly Where are the Eyes can't become a tracking device or it's just aiding surveillance, so how do we track where users have been but there aren't cameras?

Users do anonymously send a very rough estimate of their location to request all the nearby cameras, so we could use that to say "a user has been active in this county recently", but would this be too large of a breach of privacy? Is it even useful information if they're a lurker that only browses the map but never posts anything?

My guess is that this can't be done in a safe way, but I'll leave the issue open for a while to see if the community has any good suggestions.

[PanderMusubi]

Perhaps something like this: First, ask the user to allow extremely limited temporary tracking. Split the problem into many different parts. Ask user each time explicitely to help out with only that area (you okay with this for only 5 minutes?). Then actively stop that. Only ask the same user again a random few days later at random time when active with the app. Some approach similar to this should prevent builing up too detailed tracking info by accident.