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Tracking Your Cell Phone for Traffic Reports
BostonBTS writes "IntelliOne Technologies has just launched a real-world test of Need4Speed, a real-time traffic-monitoring system that tracks drivers' cell phones. From their website: 'Unlike any other solution available today, the IntelliOne Roadway Speed Measurement System produces live roadway speeds for all highways and surface streets where mobile phone coverage exists, accurate to within three miles per hour.'
Of course, any compulsory phone-tracking system raises privacy concerns. According to an article on LiveScience, 'the personal identification data of users will be stripped from cell phone signals before they are processed by IntelliOne's software.' The cell phone companies have this data, but IntelliOne says they won't be keeping their copy."
Yes... and only their 10 digit user id/phone number will be left behind.. no names...
Oh wait... sorry... wrong company
They need maping software and route planning software that will give you a nifty detour around the latest car wreck. This has been discussed in other Slashdot conversations anyway.
God spoke to me.
"We'll replace the customer's name with a sequential number for anonymous aggregation of location datastreams. We plan to release a sample of the anonymized data to the scientific community. You see, there is nothing to worry about."
And of course, AOL won't be releasing your search terms, the NSA won't be listening to your phone conversations or tracking your surfing habits, private companies won't be stockpiling huge warehouses of data to give to the government and you can trust a president who choked and fell while eating a pretzel to check and balance himself.
they say they won't keep it, but come on, they will still have all the numbers cataloged somewhere.
Just like you can "delete" mail from you gmail accont. you can't see it anymore!
Who needs Soviet-style internal passports when they can not only GPS-track your cell phone, but can also track how fast you are moving. Here comes version 2.0: it automatically calls the police and tells them approximately where they will need to be to catch you based on your current speed and direction!
There's an interesting project called Place Lab that is building a database of, among other things, cell tower ID to physical location mappings. Their goal is to allow you to "[provide] low-cost, easy-to-use device positioning for location-enhanced computing applications."
Now, they don't have all the data that these guys have, since they just sample the tower that your phone currently happens to be talking to, so you may not be able to get accurate short-term speed readings, but I bet a lot of you could think of fun things to do with it!
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way associated with Place Lab, but I'm considering using it for some LBS experiments and would love to see as many people contributing to their database as possible. :)
This is why I always keep my cell phone in a lead box.
My bet is that they will find that they have a systematic error in the traffic speed. The cell phone users are driving more slowly than the rest of the cars. Might help to predict accidents, though.
Tinfoil hat thoughts aside, this seems really cool. For general purposes you can get average roadway speed data for any segment of pavement with cell phone reception and cell-toting drivers on it. They also include an opt-in service where they will keep the personal info attatched so to bprovide a tracking service.(There are valid uses for this!)
Personally, I look at this as a nice benefit of data mining techniques.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
If this is really accurate to 3mph I can imagine police in the future just mailing tickets to people based on cellphone data. It's annoying enough as some places are installing cameras/radar sensors to just mail you speeding tickets.
Can you imagine if anytime you happen to go above the speedlimit in cell range you get a ticket? Everyone will be driving 5 miles under the speed limit all the time to "protect" themselves. I can also see this being used by insurance companies to increase rates on people who tend to speed.
On the plus side there might be some advantage to driving with the cell off with this technology. It might become the only way to get away with speeding. At least some people will get off the phone and pay attention while driving.
I'm utterly appalled at the way you make fun of America's growing surveillance system. What's wrong with sacrificing privacy for safety? Your opposition to the free market usage of your personal information smacks of Godless communism. What do you have to hide? Aren't you aware that surveillance is needed to defend our constitution from our enemies? And please stop making fun of the good people at the NSA, they only have your best interests at heart.
[end neo con parody]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Ya, sure. We heard that one before. Tell us another fairy tale.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hell, this isn't even about YOUR cell phone. It's about tower traffic. Could it be used by police to locate you? Sure, but it already is! They don't need stripped down traffic information to find out some child molester is heading north bound on hwy 78.
Is it possible for this system to be abused? Sure. Is it likely? Not really. The amount of data the company will be dealing with would make extended storage retarded. Most likely they'll be purging data as soon as the can convert it to summarized information for use in reporting and traffic trend spotting. A small amount of oversight would go a long way. Heck, they could even open source the code, in this case, the code is worthless with out the contracts with the cell providers, but at least the tech sector could take a look and feel more comfy knowing their driving habits are not being recorded.
The other huge boon to this is for the state. Imagine if you could see traffic trends by the minute covering trends over months. You could quickly identify dangerous traffic areas, distractions, traffic quirks, and all sorts of oddities that could be engineered around to reduce injuries, fatalities, and expenses.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
In Capitalist America, the phone company 0wns YOU!
Your location is your business. Anyone who uses this information, even stripped of your name, should ask first and maybe even pay you compensation.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This shouldn't work on single occupant vehicles, since drivers should have their phones turned off at all times on the road for safety.
But I'm sure it will work anyway because enough drivers will ignore safety concerns and leave their phones turned on to allow good coverage.
I know an IT guy in a small city police department. Trust me on this police don't want to share data with anyone and what data the police collects you can pay $10 for copy of the report. Why don't police want to share data? Because they collect "intel" data and some of the people in there may have done nothing wrong. Take gangs. If a gang member is arrested, they like to try to link together gang members. Well, just because you are a gang member or linked to a gang member doesn't mean that you've done anything wrong. I've been amazed at how little the police can legally share with each other. There are both state and federal laws limiting the "intel" information. I think the rule of thumb is that you can generally share your data among your department, but you generally can't share intel information farther than that. If you wand some potentially scary stuff, look up N-DEx? fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=908&issue_id=62 006 . NIBRS is about all the feds care about and it's all just crime stats.
/. a few days ago about a camera searching every passing car and doing NCIC lookups to see if there were any hits. I think that every city should have one of those systems for each of their major transportation hubs. Humans can't catch much, but with a system like that, if an auto is in the system as stolen, then a police person can atleast be alerted and stop the car that he would have otherwise missed.
http://policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm
There is a policeman that I work with. I tell him routinely, that I think that the feds should be the final resting place for every report that they write and everything should be stored by them. In car dash cameras should be attached to police reports and submitted up to the Feds and stored both to cover the individual policeman's butt, and incase anyone else in the nation wanted to compare video. I'd want that one automated though. Heck, there isn't even a "national" standard for finger prints. Each state has its own system and doesn't look outside of its system.
It's amazing how well the police do their jobs with the tools that they have.
The end total of the IT that I'd like to give to my cops would be a virtual police state. I really drooled over the traffic cameras that London could afford. We'd never be able to spend like that though. Heck, there was an article on
That device was something like $25-$30K. For my department to afford it, we'd need a grant to cover it. We could purchase something around $4-$5K, but not something for $25-30K. There are alot of neat police tools that I'd like our department to have access to, but each one is priced around $25-30K and we don't have that much to spend.
We looked last year and replacing our analog cameras and VCRs to the digital cameras with lowlight and storing them on 4 GB flash cards and wirelessly transmit. We were going to setup 5 cars with plans of upgrading our entire fleet of 25 units, but it was going to cost about $65K for the inital 5 cars and setting up the backbone system. The night vision on that system was sweet. I wish our department had it. One other nice feature was that it was always recording/buffering and whenever the officer did one of several things it would automatically start recording/saving a segment. It did GPS and showed the officer's mph.
We don't have AVL in our fleet, but we've discusseed it, but it keeps falling through. It all comes down to money.
Join Tor today!
The rest of the cars? Here in Greece, at least, everyone has at least one cellphone. I literally do not know anyone over 15 years old that doesn't have a cellphone. Except grandpa.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Who cares what any of these corporations say about "protecting our privacy"? When was the last time anyone successfully sued a corporation for privacy policy violations?
When will my mobile phone encrypt everything it transmits? Privacy violation over wires was bad enough, but broadcasting traffic over the air is begging for trouble, even if practically no one realizes it.
--
make install -not war
What if we took matters into our own hands by all getting HAM radio sets and patching through an encrypted stream? It could be like, the geek's anonymous communication system for the postmodern world.
The only way to track you would be to visually notice the HAM Radio license plates and two-meter antenna stuck to your hatchback. What could be less suspicious!
Given that it'll probably be something like:
Cell1 is infront of Cell2 by about 50 yards.
Cell1: 50mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 40mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 30mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 20mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 10mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 00mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell2: 00mph Cell1: involuntarily 10mph
Can I have a special warning ring tone for when the idiot behind me is on his/her cell and paying no attention whatsoever to my speed. One that I don't have to worry about picking up - just a ring tone that warns me I'll get hit if I don't adjust my speed to compensate for the moron.
A second warning tone for when I'm car 3 would be pretty nice too - to let me know that the moron driving an oversized SUV I can't see through is about to come to a sudden and crunchy stop so I may want to back further off than I would for a driver I'd assume knew how to brake properly. Yes, we should all drive far enough back that, with reaction times included, we can still come to a complete stop even if they had infinite deceleration but, in the real world, that's called "leaving a space for someone else to pull in to" and doesn't actually work.
My question is how can this system be accuret in large citys where some times walking and riding bikes is actully faster then the cars moving on the streets ? Data like this could display a street as being open and moving faster then the next road over when infact its backed up just as far.
The end total of the IT that I'd like to give to my cops would be a virtual police state.
Why would you even consider this? Have you seen how they behave now?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Okay... I admit, there's new information here, so it's not exactly a dupe... but still. Observe:
Note that the second and third links were actually duped in the same day.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
Why are you so concerned with technology and privacy?
/. people. Stop trying to hide. It's futile. There is only 2 true ways to hide from governments. Hide on a remote island without anything or be dead.
The United States Government and other big governments have the ability to find out anything they want about you. How hard is it to create a self terminating virus to infect your computer? VoIP makes it easy to ease drop on phone calls. The governments can track your movements with GPS devices or something little more sneaky and underhanded. Ever heard of radio isotopes? I could probaly think of more ways to invade your privacy.
My suggestion to all
With that said, I don't care of any technology that tracks my movement.
'personal identification data of users will be stripped from cell phone signals'
But of course they can just track you to your house.
I'm glad Australia takes a few years to take away our rights (DMCA) when the US tells it to.
Land of the free my ass.
!sig
A bit off-topic, but have you heard they're going to be tracking cell-phone signals to monitor traffic patterns? It's amazing! Why doesn't slashdot ever accept a story on the subject?
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You can read more here:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/14324
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/19/07452
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/01/15924
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/16/07621
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/30/12432
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/13/04282
There, that's better. Hopefully, one day they'll come to their senses, and post a story or two on the subject.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
... but it reads parts of number plates. It's called Trafficmaster. For readers in the UK who don't already know, these are the blue cameras that look like the RADAR unit on top of a traffic light, only bigger. It contains a doppler speed detector and a camera that reads the middle digits of a number plate - deliberately designed to be unable to read the full plate. Data from this is sent by PACNet to a control station, that then pages out to receivers which each pick up two capcodes. This is then broken down into the appropriate messages.
It's pretty clever stuff, and can tell the average and instantaneous speed of vehicles travelling on a stretch of road. If it sees some cars go into a section, it times them coming out. Although it's more than possible for two similar number plates to be passed through, particularly in the same area (imagine if you had two cars, registered SY06ADG and SY06ADH - they'd both appear as "06AD"), it takes an average of all the vehicles. So if your car appears - 06AD - and mine comes through a moment later at roughly the right speed - here comes 90ET - then it guesses they must be the same two they saw going in. The system expects that the speed through that section is around 70mph, so when 68BA takes a bit longer to come through, as does 29TG, the road must be getting slower. Once it goes below something like 25mph it pages out a message to Trafficmaster users warning them of slow traffic ahead.
I've seen this before. Months ago exactly the same system was set up over here. But nothing is sent to any mobile phone, nor is there any need to store any private data: The only thing one needs to measure is the frequnecy of handovers. A handover is when a mobile phone in a cellular systems hops from one cell to the next. So when you measure per cell the amount of phones comong into the cell and the amount of phones leaving the cell, you get a very good idea of the traffic: If incoming is about equal to outgoing then traffic is flowing. If incoming is larger then outgoing then there is a buildup of traffic, the start of a jam If outgoing is larger then incoming, a jam is dissapating If the freqency of handovers is high, the traffic rolling going fast If the frequncy of handovers is low, the traffic is rolling slow (So it is like measuring pressure and flowspeed of a fluid) Again, Note that there is no real reason at all to collect individual IDs. The data gained this way is simply combined with data coming from other measuring techniques (loops in the road most of the time) to control electronic road signs and the classic radio traffic announcements and TMC. The set up over here was specifically aimed at tunnels: there it is very easy to measure traffic since the inside of the tunnel is usually one cell and both ends are two other cells.
120 chars is not enough!
This site from the province of Brabant in the Netherlands works by tracking cell-phones http://actueleverkeersinformatie.brabant.nl/ It is operational for more than a year.
The company I work for, LogicaCMG, already has done a few similar implementations for a number of clients in the Netherlands. I am project manager of these projects, and the most interesting one is in the province of Noord-Brabant, where we cover 5500 kilometers of road. It's in operation for over three years. A website can be found at URL:hhtp://actueleverkeersinformatie.brabant.nl. The technology we use is remarkably like the one Intellione claims is patented. We use Appliedgenerics' Rodin24 software as the core of the system. Appliedgenerics has been acquired by navigation company TomTom. Their software also makes use of the cell network's A-bis interface and advanced timing features during conversations. This might get interesting, since Appliedgenerics also claims to have their software pretty well protected by patents. Anyone knows who owns IntelliOne?
I, for one, welcome our new cellphone tracking overlords
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
So if a car is in traffic travelling at 3mph, I am jogging past at 5mph, and a motorbike rider drives past at 50mph, all parties have a mobile phone... What is the speed?
...will they?
I can't see it working until lots of people subscribe, and lots of people will not subscribe to inaccurate data...
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
I work for the company that is going to be processing the GPS data for intellione. Really, we will only be producing traffic flow data. No big brother stuff, as it's not nearly that cool.
I threw my cell at 97 mph
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
For the most part, I agree. I almost always give myself enough space to stop, regardless of what the driver in front of me chooses to do, even as I cruise at around 78. (I say 'almost' because you just wouldn't believe me otherwise.) The few people who don't understand that I'm not going any slower than the car in front of me will try to get around me in foolish and dangerous ways, and it happens. My reaction is just slightly different from my parent's; I back off, add a friendly gesture (normally a sarcastic thumbs-up, but occasionally a different digit), and let them in. This doesn't really lead to road rage, since I then back off to a safe following distance, and the jackasses I flip off know they deserve it.
I drive plenty, and this keeps me clear of stupid drivers all over Michigan.
the data you refer to in your last sentence does not exist, if you read the article carefully, you will see that the information gathered by the IO system is already stripped of individually identifying characteristics other than geopositional data
I can't tell if this means that any cell phone passing through this will have it's information passed on to this service, or if you would have to have a specific device which did it, and have allowed them to do it.
I'd be really concerned about any third party being given free access to my cell location records without my permission. And I don't believe anyone who says they'll strip data they have in order to protect my provacy. They shouldn't ever see that data, then they'll have nothing to strip, and nothing to forget.
The idea of 3rd parties having all of that information is just another step towards the really intrusive big brother we're all trying to avoid. And a disaster waiting to happen.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's not like we're all Pavlovs dogs. You do NOT have to answer your cellphone the second you hear it! Leave the cell phone on in the car. Then you'll at least know to check for voicemail or pull over to take the call -- OK, that last one isn't applicable to freeway driving.
I probably let it ring through to voicemail more than half the time. It's a good habit to make sure people don't expect you to answer the phone 24x7.
"real-time traffic-monitoring system that tracks drivers' cell phones."
This used to be a april 1. joke here (Estonia) about 8+ years ago.
Right. This will remain true until the Department of Homeland Security informs them that
a) they must retain this data,
b) they must deliver this data to the DHS upon request,
c) they are prohibited from telling anyone that they are doing this or have been requested to.