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California Tracks Everyone Using Toll Transponders
obtuse writes "Direct monitoring of traffic sounds pretty cool, but some people don't want their toll transponders tracked. They aren't installing direct driver tracking for law enforcement now, but the collected data could be subpoenaed. Of course, anyone who didn't want to be tracked could just put it in the glovebox anyway, so they won't be catching clever felons or tracking real paranoiacs."
What I worry about it that leading to civil uses -- what if my wife's lawyer got records showing I was sneaking over the Golden Gate to visit my mistress (expensive booty call with the new tolls, BTW).
I wish there were some reasonable way to insure against a slippery slope. I would prefer to live in a country where it's easy to catch criminals without sliding into surveilling lawful citizens.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I'm sure glad I was never asked to explain how I made it nine miles in under eight minutes on a 55 MPH road.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
The way to pay for this fancy new traffic monitoring is clearly to send tickets to everyone that goes from point A to point B in less time than it should take per the posted speed limit. Considering that we already have automatic red light and speeding traffic tickets (no police intervention required!), this seems like the next step for the "coddle you to death" bureaucrats to take.
Lots of petrified grits
Here in north Texas, the NTTA is the toll authority. If you drive around town, you can find Amtech transponders mounted high up on telephone poles -- miles away from the tollroads! Not only does NTTA track you on the tollway, they are apparently keeping tabs on you when you're not on the tollway.
For the non-believers in Dallas: Look in the median on Valley View, just west of Marsh in Farmers Branch.
Bike.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. In order to gain that privilege you must expect to give up some privacy in order to protect the public.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
In most states, an unmarked police car can follow you on the road and note your every movement without you even knowing about it or agreeing to it. There is no way to prevent it, and, even more scary, it is not illegal. There is not even an opt-out capability. They can use this information in court against you at any time they chose!!!
The only way to prevent this loss of privacy is to stay at home, lock the doors, don't use the phone or cable TV, or even pick up your mail. You must remain inside at all times and out of site.
Only then can you really enjoy your privacy. Of course, you can't enjoy anything else, but who cares. At least you can enjoy your privacy.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Quite simply, any jurisdiction that even has a fraction of a brain will not use an electronic toll system to issue tickets. If they do, people will stop using the electronic toll system. It's just that simple. The toll authority has just as much of an interest in having people use the electronic toll system as people do in using it to save time. More people using the electronic system means fewer people employed taking tolls and less traffic. They won't jeopardize that.
As far as tracking people using the transponders, I don't know that it's that bad a thing. Like they said, you can always avoid tracking by putting your transponder in a foil bag, and they're even going to provide them upon request (It's not a pain in the ass. I have two transponders, and they're only on the windshield when I am going through a tollbooth, because I have a convertible). That should show goodwill, at the very least. And California does have some of the worst traffic in the country. Any additional info on how it moves (or doesn't) is probably going to go a long way towards making it better.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
That reminds me of a really strange movie we saw back in first year calculus class. (Yeah, movies in math class. Weird in itself.)
Had to do with just such a situation, with the driver being referred to the cop for speeding. The trooper proceeds to explain Rolle's Theorem and Mean Value Theorem to the driver as proof that somewhere in between the two toll booths, he had to have been speeding.
I guess to the extent that I remember the name of Rolle's Theorem, the movie served its purpose. OTOH it always seemed kind of intuitively obvious to me.
-- Alastair
More people who appear to be tollway violators because they didn't pull their transponder out soon enough.
Transponder mod chips for random serial numbers.
People on cell phones pulling out transponders as they try to get through the booth.
People setting up their own silent tracking antennas and keeping all information.
Transponder mod chips with serial numbers belonging to people tracked with the previous method.
Beowolf transponder clusters to make it look like you're a traveling traffic jam.
No Zen is good zen
If you're paranoid, they'll give you a mylar storage bag for free. Otherwise, the serial numbers will be encrpyted and seperate from the data. Not only that, but "All record of serials numbers stored in electronic files will be destroyed daily, leaving only general averages and patterns for later study," Berman said.
Houston has its own traffic tracking system that operates in a similar fashion. When I first realized that they were using the toll-tags to calculate this, I became concerned about the privacy issues (especially given that this use is technically a violation of the license agreement). So I called a friend of mine at the Texas Transportation Institute and asked about it.
And lo and behold, they actually turn out to take the privacy aspect very seriously. When an EZ-Tag (TM) passes under a sensor, it gets assigned an id. When it passes under the next sensor, it calculates the speed, adds it to the database with this generated id (not the toll tag number). And then it assigns it a new ID for the trip to the next sensor. Thus, TTI is incapable of knowing, even under threat of subpoena, the identity of any car passing down the highway or the route of any single vehicle beyond any single highway segment. The entire system is designed to prevent it.
With the red light cameras, the ticket is assessed against the vehicle (like a parking ticket) rather than against the driver's license (as with most speeding tickets) and the red light cameras get some proof that the ticketed vehicle was involved. With a calculated speeding ticket, however, there is no such proof. Again, the accused could simply say that neither they, nor their car, was on the road at that time, and there'd be no way to disprove it.
There is one other technical issue with trying to issue speeding tickets based on ETC data: most ETC systems don't collect enough data to make the calculation.
There are, basically, two types of toll facilities: boundry systems, where you get charged a toll each time you cross a boundry, and closed-loop systems, where you get charged based on the length of travel in the toll system. You can only calculate speed in a closed loop system, when both your entry and exit are recorded. Many toll systems are only boundry systems.
Even on a closed loop system, you can only calculate the average speed in the system. Under heavy traffic conditions, the average speed is likely never to exceed the posted speed limit! (this is the sad truth about speeding: it rarely benefits the speed but, occasionally, it is a great harm to an innocent bystander) You can pretty easily wipe out the extra time you gained by speeding while waiting to at the exit toll plaza.
Note, some agencies do issue fines for speeding thorugh the toll lanes, but that is a safety issue. None of the agencies that we work with issue actual speeding tickets based on speed in the toll lane. Also, many of the agencies maintain a constant police presence at the toll plazas, in order to go after violators. This was true even before there were ETC systems.
The ETC tags are pretty good for collecting information on what happens at the toll plazas. We can even get a fair amount of agregate information about the entire toll facility itself, based on plaza activity. But it is very difficult to extract information about individuals based on ETC data. The agencies seem to have a pretty good understanding of what the ETC data is good for and what legal limitations they are under.
One example to illustrate this point: Some of the original ETC installations took pictures of violators from in front of the vehicle, including a picture of the driver and passenger in the front seat. Now, however, we only take pictures of the front and rear bumpers, specifically avoiding either front or rear windshield.
The reason is a legal one. Early on in the history of ETC systems a law suit was brought against one of the local agencies because a driver had violated the toll lane and had his picture taken. The violation notice was mailed to his house, where it was opened by his wife. His wife was quite upset to find a picture of her husband and a strange woman driving in his car in the middle of the day!
The local agencies are now prevented, legally, from invading a driver's privacy by photographing the driver or passengers of a vehicle passing thorugh an ETC system. (We still get some interesting pictures, but only when the driver's have gone out of their way to make themselves visible to the lane cameras)