I experienced this the other day, I am almost certain that I have experienced it before, but wasn't 100% certain until it happened right in front of my eyes.

I live in a suburban area in Australia, next to a metropolitan area. My suburb contains a popular through road to another area, so traffic levels are quite high.

there is a section of road with a paved cutout almost on the corner that has a spot to park off the road and a few days ago there was a mobile camera car there with speed cameras covering both directions.

I was taking my teen to school and didn't have Waze running as we'd left the house late, but I wasn't speeding. He'd only just got there though, so when I got to the school, I fired up Waze and on the way back, noticed that another Waze user had already tagged him, so I thanked the user and continued on my way, noting subconsciously that the driver of the camera car was standing behind it having a smoke and looking at his phone.

I only live 2 minutes down the road from where he was, and could still see him on the map once I got home. As I was about to get out of the car, the tag "disappeared" and I realised that the driver had untagged himself, so that Waze users wouldn't know he was still there.

I drove back past him and sure enough, there he was still standing behind the car (an Isuzu Dmax) out of view on his phone smoking.

I tagged him again, went a few hundred metres down the road and turned around at a roundabout and came back, tagging him again for good measure.

Where he was parked, he was blindingly obvious to anyone driving past (the same car is a regular in the area, big and white with blacked-out windows), but he was also in a position that by the time you saw him, it was too late to slow down as he would have had the cameras pointed at the point where you come into view to catch as many people as possible.

*Nobody* with Waze would have untagged him as "no longer there" as he was directly in your line of sight as you come round a slight bend and very obviously a camera car, so the only reasonable explanation is that the police are well aware that Waze users tag mobile cameras and have started to untag themselves when they appear so that they get more hits on people as they're not visible on the maps for an extra amount of time until more people tag them again.

My other experience was with a mobile camera "pod" a big, armoured thing like a fat grey Dalek that they use here. I tagged one late at night that wasn't tagged and noticed that wasn't tagged again in the morning despite it still being there. I went past it many times over the course of 24 hours and had to tag it each time to say it was there, as it had been repeatedly untagged.

Waze needs to have something in their mobile camera DB that ignores users who do a lot of untagging of cameras without tagging new ones that get a "thumbs up".

I also think it would be a good idea if this was a "shadow-ban" type deal where them untagging cameras shows it as untagged to them, but not to other users until several users have confirmed the camera is no longer there.

a way it could work

• Monitor user activity of users who "untag" mobile cameras in an area where a camera gets re-tagged afterwards in the same spot.
• Potentially monitor these "untagging" users who have not been in motion and are regularly in close proximity to an area where other users tag a mobile camera. (not sure if feasible?)
• where a user "untags" cameras regularly but does not tag new ones (or tags new ones that other users then fail to confirm) shadow-ban them from future untagging, possibly mark for manual review at a later date? are they regularly in areas where cameras are spotted, i.e. much more than your average users?
• let them keep "untagging" themselves so they keep doing it, but don't untag cameras until multiple other users (who are actively in motion) also untag the same camera.

Look, I get that it's an arms race, but we need to get ahead of the game and not let LE beat us at this.