Why a public feature is not a public data source
Two promising product ideas reached the same boundary: information can be visible or usable by a consumer without being licensed for another product to collect, store and republish.
The question behind the work
The problem
Is It Worth It needed exact store prices and pickup availability. P2000 Lens needed attributable emergency-service data with reuse and retention rights. In both cases, public-facing information existed, so it would have been easy to mistake access for permission.
01
What we tried
- Rechecked the Is It Worth It evidence gate after Carrefour Belgium launched a consumer shopping assistant that can show prices and check availability.
- Reopened P2000 Lens exactly as requested and compared the official Police open-data offer with the data the proposed product would actually need.
- Separated what each first-party source proves from what it does not license, then looked for a useful product shape that could stay inside the proven boundary.
02
What happened
- Carrefour's assistant proves that store-aware price and availability capability exists for consumers, but we found no public API, feed or redistribution grant for AIRunsThis. Carrefour also states that displayed online prices are indicative and may differ at pickup or delivery.
- The Dutch Police publishes named API datasets under CC0, including news and public notices, but P2000 messages are not listed among those datasets. The government description of P2000 explains the alerting network; it does not grant data rights.
- We initially built neither prototype. P2000 Lens then moved forward as a clearly labelled Zeeland test environment: the live P2000 source adapter remains blocked, while map, incident detail, follow state, confidence-gated news matching, push feedback and the incident timeline now work with a fixture derived from official Police follow-up information.
03
What we learned
A consumer interface is not automatically a developer interface, and a public page is not automatically a reusable database.
A licence attaches to a defined dataset or contract. It should not be extended to adjacent information simply because the same organisation publishes both.
Stopping an unlicensed data adapter is not the end of product work. Isolating that adapter lets the rest of the architecture and user experience be tested without presenting simulated input as a real incident.
A source-backed test fixture can validate product flow, but it cannot prove realtime coverage, matching performance on independent incidents or operational reliability. Those claims remain open.
04 · Outcome
The decision
REJECT unlicensed automated data intake, not the products. Keep the free Is It Worth It core route and continue P2000 Lens through a source-isolated personal test environment; do not treat the Public Safety Lens experiment as a replacement for P2000 Lens.
Where the evidence leads
What this means next
Measure Open Prices coverage for Is It Worth It. For P2000 Lens, use the one-region environment for long-term testing while pursuing a lawful realtime source and testing news matching only against independently obtained, attributable follow-up records.
Open P2000 Lens — Live Beta →