Catonic wrote:
This program and hardware are being used to assess road conditions, but there is some talk of using it to register speeds and ticket accordingly. Is it just me or are people actively looking for ways to Big Brother each other?

Egads! "AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia."

Fuck! I live in Atlanta! And I'll bet they're only a few double-plus-bad years away from contracting with Cingular.

-janelane, paranoid

janelane wrote:

Catonic wrote:
This program and hardware are being used to assess road conditions, but there is some talk of using it to register speeds and ticket accordingly. Is it just me or are people actively looking for ways to Big Brother each other?

Egads! "AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia."

Fuck! I live in Atlanta! And I'll bet they're only a few double-plus-bad years away from contracting with Cingular.

-janelane, paranoid

I wonder how they're distinguishing between passengers and drivers

terratogen wrote:

janelane wrote:

Catonic wrote:
This program and hardware are being used to assess road conditions, but there is some talk of using it to register speeds and ticket accordingly. Is it just me or are people actively looking for ways to Big Brother each other?

Egads! "AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia."

Fuck! I live in Atlanta! And I'll bet they're only a few double-plus-bad years away from contracting with Cingular.

-janelane, paranoid

I wonder how they're distinguishing between passengers and drivers

Its illegal to travel at that speed on that road. We have evidence that you were travelling at that speed on that road. You are guilty. We don't care how you did it. Its not really our problem if you weren't the one driving. You should have asked the driver to slow down. Only criminals have something to hide.

I wonder how they're distinguishing between passengers and drivers

Its illegal to travel at that speed on that road. We have evidence that you were travelling at that speed on that road. You are guilty. We don't care how you did it. Its not really our problem if you weren't the one driving. You should have asked the driver to slow down. Only criminals have something to hide.

Heh... Only it's not Illegal to travel at that speed... Its illegal to operate a motor vehicle that fast.

terratogen wrote:

Catotonic wrote:
This program and hardware are being used to assess road conditions, but there is some talk of using it to register speeds and ticket accordingly. Is it just me or are people actively looking for ways to Big Brother each other?

Pretty petty reasoning to give away privacy.

All of these accusations about the big brother, and the ticketing speeding motorists are totally untrue. The ACLU has even said that this does not infringe on privacy acts.
The data that the DOT's receive is completly anonymous . Sprint is the only one within this circle that knows who you are. The data that the DOT's and AirSage receives is a random, but will stay with the motorist until they are out of the area that the information is being taken in. For example say I have a sprint cell phone and my number is 555-789-1234, airsage could get something like 9rtd1lsg. There would be no way for anyone to directly tie this number with a particular person.

Decius wrote:

Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology.

A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.

Wow thats fucked up. AirSage says identifying information is stripped from the data in their pilot in Georgia.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. The day I can be ticketed or have my insurance adjusted based on tracking my vehicle is the day i stop wanting to drive a car. It's not worth it to me if I can't occasionally do the (admittedly sometimes unsafe) things I do. Driving precisely 35 MPH around town is for busses and if this tech goes into widespread use, they better use ALL of the revenue to build some bad ass public transportation infrastructure.

k wrote:

Decius wrote:

Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology.

A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.

Wow thats fucked up. AirSage says identifying information is stripped from the data in their pilot in Georgia.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. The day I can be ticketed or have my insurance adjusted based on tracking my vehicle is the day i stop wanting to drive a car. It's not worth it to me if I can't occasionally do the (admittedly sometimes unsafe) things I do. Driving precisely 35 MPH around town is for busses and if this tech goes into widespread use, they better use ALL of the revenue to build some bad ass public transportation infrastructure.

Get used to it. This is the way things are headed. The advantage will be that you'll likely get a substantial discount for allowing yourself to be monitored and compliant. The whole point of insurance is to manage risk. Since the costs for insurance are so high and are essentially inflated by a small percentage of the population in the pool, then the only way to reduce costs is to ensure compliance.

You'll see this everywhere in a few years. It's already happening in healthcare and re-insurance. It'll fly under the guise of 'transparency', but it is essentially behavior monitoring. There will be tremendous productivity gains and cost savings, but the demise of privacy. All of the think tanks and future forward people have this pegged within 10 years.

flynn23 wrote:

Get used to it. This is the way things are headed. The advantage will be that you'll likely get a substantial discount for allowing yourself to be monitored and compliant. The whole point of insurance is to manage risk. Since the costs for insurance are so high and are essentially inflated by a small percentage of the population in the pool, then the only way to reduce costs is to ensure compliance.

You'll see this everywhere in a few years. It's already happening in healthcare and re-insurance. It'll fly under the guise of 'transparency', but it is essentially behavior monitoring. There will be tremendous productivity gains and cost savings, but the demise of privacy. All of the think tanks and future forward people have this pegged within 10 years.

Of course it is. I wrote a bit unclearly perhaps before, but I absolutely know this is on the way. You don't need a think tank to get the economics involved and once you know enough about tech to see the potential, it's obvious.

Truthfully, maybe more monitoring will be better. For now, your rates are based on statistcal analysis of payouts and accident rates. But if there's enough data to see, categorically, that the accident I was in happened while i was obeying every law and nicety of the road, the burden can be shifted entirely to the responsible party. Unlike now, where even an accident in which I was not at fault causes me trouble.

Not that I like the idea of someone tracking all my movements. In all truth, I hope it becomes an argument in favor of high quality public transportation. Of course, the growing desire to track and monitor passengers there may render that distinction irrelevant.