Police and Lawyers Love E-ZPass

John_Schmidt writes "The AP is reporting that police are using EZ-Pass records to solve crimes. Lawyers are also getting the records to use in divorce cases. The article also mentions that the NYS Thruway has sensors to read the cards along the highway (not just at toll booths) but says the data is scrambled and not stored."

Comments

Re:Hype and FUD ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only vehicles that have a GPS which sends a signal when the airbad is deployed are cars equipped with OnStar (on GM cars, Mercedes Benz uses a different system run by a company in Texas whose name I cannot remember right now). This is an optional pay service -- you don't have it unless you pay for the service.

They pass GPS data at an airbag event to allow the Police and Fire people to know where to go.

However what you should keep in mind, in the long view of things, is that this information is highly volatile in the system and is intentially designed to be hard to capture for any purpose other than what been designated.

I'm actually a bit impressed. Normally I would expect OnStar/GM to do everything they can to market/sell this information to any data-pimp on the street. But I can speak from first hand personal knowledge of the OnStar system that this is not the case. The information is obtained, but too volatile to be of any use of this sort.

Re:How They decide speed limits

[/dev/trash]

Bull crap. You'd go 85 if the limit was 80. You'd go 90 if the limit was 85.