Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters

Can a smartphone app help fight corruption?

That’s the idea behind Bribespot, a nascent Web site and smartphone app designed to let people shed light on, well, bribes. (A hat-tip to Urbandaddy for bringing this intriguing idea to our attention).

Bribespot.com

The Web site says the app employs the same sort of mobile “check in” technology that services like Foursquare use. But instead of letting everyone know that you’re enjoying a fabulous latte at Starbucks, you let them know that you just were forced to pay a bribe to the subway inspector because you were caught riding (in Hungary) without a ticket. “The more check-ins are made at a certain location, the more visible are corruption hotspots on the map,” the site says, and the more likely those in charge of a particular institution are to take heed. “That is where the real change starts,” the site adds, hopefully.

The site, which just went live, was hammered into existence at a recent Garage48 gathering in Estonia, where tech geeks gather with the goal of putting their ideas into action in just 48 hours. The app is available for Android phones; the developers are working on an iPhone version. The site says it guards against malicious or fraudulent campaigns in various ways, like limiting the number of check-ins daily from the same phone.

Bribespot.comThe Web site Bribespot uses the same sort of mobile “check in” technology that services like Foursquare use.

The posts are anonymous, which is a good thing. But is reporting corruption using a location-based device a smart idea? In an e-mail, Artas Bartas, Bribespot’s managing director, said it’s theoretically possible to link a specific report to a specific phone, but that doing so would “require some considerable resources,” like access to a mobile phone company’s user database. “The question is, who would be ready to invest such resources for the sake of going after the person reporting the petty act of bribery?” he said.

That said, Bribespot is going to “great lengths” not to collect any directly identifiable information about users of its app; user identifiers saved in its database, he said, are “random generated strings which — even if somebody gets a hold of them — will not tell you much about whose phone it was.”

A quick perusal of posts on Bribespot reveals many items from Romania (bribing exam officials seems popular) and other European countries. But there are a smattering from the United States, like someone paying $100 to get their fake I.D. back from a bouncer at a Miami restaurant or paying almost $50 to cut the line to get into a popular bar in lower Manhattan.

We at Bucks certainly aren’t suggesting that readers do anything illegal. But does, say, slipping a few tens to the hostess to secure a reservation at a swank new restaurant qualify? I once lived in a city where, I was told by a long-time resident, you couldn’t officially put large bulky items out on trash day, but you could maybe get that old couch to disappear if you slipped a few bills to the sanitation crew.

Have you ever paid extra for a service? When does that sort of behavior cross the line?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=89cbda09e1b7aeb21684bc0f1fa15f0e