GPS and cars
Recently headlines were made by an announcement from OnStar that they will be shipping an ability to stop a car once it is reported stolen. This has certain people up in arms about the implications of this technology, and their points are very valid. If OnStar can do it to render a stolen car useless, what if the Department of Homeland Security could 'borrow' the system to enforce a 'do not drive' list? OnStar uses GPS technology already, so locating the stolen car is pretty easy once it is reported as lost.
There are a whole host of things that detailed GPS data enables in cars. Not the least of which is the possibility of a truly automatic car. That sort of thing is still a long ways away, but we're getting ever closer to two other possibilities.
The two possibilities I consider very likely unless legislation is proposed to prohibit it involve in essence a black box for the car. As the road system of the United States gets ever more detailed in digital spaces it makes GPS navigational units even more useful. This is already happening. The next step is when the nav units start phoning home.
The first area I predict to really come into play will be from insurance companies. Actuaries would LOVE the detailed information provided by a GPS location log and road data. Cross reference the two and you have all sorts of goodies:
Once the above is on the market, you can guarantee that nanny-boxes will also be on the market. Have a new driver under the age of 18 in the house? Give them their own car, and a nanny box to keep them honest about their driving. This technology is already in use in the commercial trucking industry.
The next level is legal. I don't know if OnStar is already being given search warrants for the GPS logs of cars, but it is only a matter of time before they are. Once GPS devices with phone-home capabilities are embedded in more cars, the ability of law enforcement to see everywhere a car went increases markedly. Given enough time, laws may evolve to the point where such logs are mandated in all road vehicles, and can be queried by a nearby police cruiser or from the big database it reports to. Some science fiction already covers this issue.
Obviously there are some privacy concerns here. Does my right to privacy extend to keeping my vehicular location private from law enforcement without a search warrant? It could be argued that the trackers just track the vehicle not the driver, and thus no implied guarantee of privacy exists. Or it could be argued that operating a vehicle in the state of [$state$] is contingent on certain terms of use, stipulated when you applied for a drivers license and signed, thus giving statutory consent to have your location tracked on demand. This has yet to be clarified.
The big threat to privacy here isn't the government, though that threat is increasing, it's still the private sector. There is no guarantee to privacy in the private sector. If you can save big money by having your location tracked everywhere, you can bet that there will be hoards of people signing up to save big money. This leads to circumstances where the US Government purchases information on the open market that they couldn't legally collect directly, such as domestic satellite surveillance. The private sector doesn't have near the restrictions on it that the government has, but the government has deep enough pockets that it can pay the private sector to do what it couldn't.
So expect to see GPS-related laws start popping up.
There are a whole host of things that detailed GPS data enables in cars. Not the least of which is the possibility of a truly automatic car. That sort of thing is still a long ways away, but we're getting ever closer to two other possibilities.
The two possibilities I consider very likely unless legislation is proposed to prohibit it involve in essence a black box for the car. As the road system of the United States gets ever more detailed in digital spaces it makes GPS navigational units even more useful. This is already happening. The next step is when the nav units start phoning home.
The first area I predict to really come into play will be from insurance companies. Actuaries would LOVE the detailed information provided by a GPS location log and road data. Cross reference the two and you have all sorts of goodies:
- What percentage of the time does the driver exceed the posted speed-limits?
- How often is the car parked in high vehicular crime areas?
- How many miles per day/week/month/year does the car get driven?
- When the car gets driven outside of 'normal', such as driving to Grandma's.
Once the above is on the market, you can guarantee that nanny-boxes will also be on the market. Have a new driver under the age of 18 in the house? Give them their own car, and a nanny box to keep them honest about their driving. This technology is already in use in the commercial trucking industry.
The next level is legal. I don't know if OnStar is already being given search warrants for the GPS logs of cars, but it is only a matter of time before they are. Once GPS devices with phone-home capabilities are embedded in more cars, the ability of law enforcement to see everywhere a car went increases markedly. Given enough time, laws may evolve to the point where such logs are mandated in all road vehicles, and can be queried by a nearby police cruiser or from the big database it reports to. Some science fiction already covers this issue.
Obviously there are some privacy concerns here. Does my right to privacy extend to keeping my vehicular location private from law enforcement without a search warrant? It could be argued that the trackers just track the vehicle not the driver, and thus no implied guarantee of privacy exists. Or it could be argued that operating a vehicle in the state of [$state$] is contingent on certain terms of use, stipulated when you applied for a drivers license and signed, thus giving statutory consent to have your location tracked on demand. This has yet to be clarified.
The big threat to privacy here isn't the government, though that threat is increasing, it's still the private sector. There is no guarantee to privacy in the private sector. If you can save big money by having your location tracked everywhere, you can bet that there will be hoards of people signing up to save big money. This leads to circumstances where the US Government purchases information on the open market that they couldn't legally collect directly, such as domestic satellite surveillance. The private sector doesn't have near the restrictions on it that the government has, but the government has deep enough pockets that it can pay the private sector to do what it couldn't.
So expect to see GPS-related laws start popping up.
posted by Corwin at 9:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home