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New York Taxi Drivers To Strike Over GPS
Stony Stevenson notes a NYTimes story on labor unrest caused by high-tech privacy concerns. One organization of taxi drivers plans a 48-hour strike, while another opposes any such action. "One taxi group plans to strike from 5 a.m. Sept. 5, through 5 a.m. Sept. 7, in opposition to New York City's requirement that all cabs be equipped with GPS technology beginning Oct. 1... saying GPS infringes on drivers' privacy... The Taxi and Limousine Commission passed a rule stating that all New York City cabs must have touch-screen display panels, credit card readers, and GPS beginning this year. Many taxis already are equipped with the technologies, which allow passengers to get news, route data, and other information. The TLC claims that the technology will not be used to invade drivers' privacy but will provide real-time maps and help passengers recover lost property."
I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the occasional taxi driver making a tourist's trip 10x longer than it's supposed to be...
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
"The TLC claims that the technology will not be used to invade drivers' privacy but will provide real-time maps and help passengers recover lost property." While it may provide real-time maps and help passengers recover lost property, none of that means that it will not be used to invade drivers' privacy.
What could honestly be bad about having a GPS installed in your taxi? The only thing it could possibly be used for is stopping taxi drivers from ripping off customers, really.
Privacy threat? How is it any worse than having a camera in your office at a desk job?
This is a tremenous violation of our privacy. It will be much harder for us to make off-the-book trips and just pocket the money.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Full Disclosure: I do contract work for several companies that make mobile gps / bardoce / magstripe enabled devices for similar purposes.
Why I do support this
a) Improve productivity: The driver is on the job. As a capitalistic society we strive to improve productivity and, while sad, monitoring does do this.
b) All cabs take credit cards: Have you ever had a bad cab experience? How about having no cash and driver not accepting credit because it's past 6 PM (wtf is with that rule anyhow)
c) Bad Routes avoided: Looking at a map gives you some idea where you are and the driver would be less likely to take longer routes. Puts you, the consumer in control
d) Better privacy: Remember the stories of the handheld credit card readers being used by dishonest restaurant employees to steal your credit card? You don't hand your card to anyone, you pay at the device
e) Better oversight: If all the system use similar credit checking devices it's easier for regulatory groups to audit them -- versus having 30 different pos* devices
* Point of Sale
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
I know when I work that the system administrators are watching what I am doing: checking which ports I have open, which websites I visit and maybe even sometimes reading my mail. It seems like this is normal these days. Good luck with the strike, but I doubt it will change anything.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
When the insurance companies force their customers to put GPS devices in their own personal vehicles, no one is up in arms, but put them in cabs and there's a strike.
Even though TFA is a bit vague, AFAICC, the GPS transmitter only works when they have a passenger and the passenger wants it to be on. If this is the case, this is a really pathetic excuse for a strike. Maybe the are worried the Commission will take away their licenses for using circuitous routes to defraud customers or something.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
I am a staunch libertarian and advocate for personal right to privacy, but there are no valid reasons for drivers to be concerned about their privacy in this scenario. Are airline pilots in danger of having their privacy violated because the aircraft's current trajectory and speed is logged? Effective fleet management and tracking is part of the industry you're working in, folks.
/Paranoid off
That said, I inherently don't trust government, and can start to see where the passenger's rights become threatened somewhat when the government's database starts linking credit card transactions with GPS records and begin constructing logs of people's travels. I mean, they are requiring cabs implement both at the same time.
So nice to know that now, not only is my credit card info available, but every taxi trip I take in NYC is geocached for me and the DHS.
I can just imagine a movie in the not too near future (I'm writing this down because I want it documented that I thought of it) where a serial killer spells out the name of his next intended victim using his GPS fare info. The detective cracks that mystery just in time to see the killer spell the name of someone dear to him.
Meh. Probably rent it, but not see it in the theater.
Fail to see how this infringes on driver's privacy.
Do the cars belong to the drivers? No. They are the company's property.
Do the drivers drive them in their own free time? No. They are doing business work driving these cars and are paid for it.
Do companies have the right to keep track of how their assets are used? Absolutely.
For those who compare this to companies that put keyloggers on employee's computers - this is NOT the same. If companies were to install cameras inside cabs and watch the driver's behavior (something many bus companies actually do), or record the drivers voice, or even record driving manners by analyzing the car computer's data - you'd have a (somewhat) legitimate case of privacy invasion, since you'd monitor the driver himself.
The GPS however, only monitors the cab. In the worst case scenario (for privacy advocates) the data could be used to find drivers who just don't do their jobs, say those who say they are busy with a customer while the GPS indicates they are parked near a fast food restaurant. But companies do have the right to monitor the productivity of their workers to a certain degree.
This kind of monitoring would be equivalent to an IT company monitoring which workstations are turned on, how often does a particular person check in his source code, or even where is the current physical location of a business laptop given to an employee on a business trip and who has been told that the laptop is for official use only, and that he should use his personal laptop for any non work related activity or travel. This is fair business practice, not a privacy invasion. If the employee was stupid enough to take his WORK laptop to a nightclub, and/or even stupider to do it on his workshift, and then get tracked there, it's his own fault and he deserves to be fired - not for immoral behavior but for abuse of company resources and slacking off on the job. Had the employee taken his own personal laptop on his own free time, he would not have been monitored or caught.
Same story with the cabs - they are not personal vehicles - they are given to drivers for business use only, on paid business shifts only, and companies have the right to make sure the equipment is used as intended.
Besides, there are lots of other legimiate uses for GPS in cabs - such as improved computer-assisted dispatcher coordination, by automatically finding which cab is closest to a taxi request, or by providing interactive driving maps to drivers.
I'm all for privacy, and I hate when companies track the behavior of employees which is not related to business use or done on their own free time (such as firing someone because he visits a swinger's club or whatever). But if you do that on your workshift and using company resources, then it's your own stupid fault and you have every right to be fired.
I live in NYC and take a cab ride just about every day. I still get excited when I find a cab with this new technology suite. After all, San Fran has a much nicer, modern "subway" system, Hong Kong has that great train with video screens, and I'm sure other cities have new stuff to brag about with their transportation infrastructure. What do we have in NYC? Checked out our subways recently?
The cool thing is that these vehicles are still the famous "yellow" taxi cabs of NYC lore, but:
1. You can watch a real time, zoomable map of NYC to see where you are and estimate how much further you have to go. Any idea how great this is for tourists or people new to town? (Was very helpful showing in-laws the route from airport to home in real time and pointing out important locations...)
2. You can watch news which is great if stuck in FDR traffic.
3. You can see how much you owe and why.
4. Legal information / passenger rights / terms and conditions are presented much more efficiently and tidily. That is, it cleans up the cab from all of that paperwork.
I fully support the new cabs and hope that they will improve them with real time traffic volume on the maps, etc.
For those of you who don't see the boiling frog issue...
1:Taxi company installs GPS and charges with credit cards.
2:Taxi company stores credit card details of it's customers in huge database
3:Taxi company stores GPS data in huge database
4:NSA demand access to the last 10 years of data from the database.
5:The government now knows about every cab ride you have taken, within an accuracy of 1m - 10m, for the past 10 years.
It doesn't matter if the NSA does not have this authority today ( hint: they do ) the mere fact that data like this can be accumulated means that it will be, and that will at any latter point in time enable anybody with access to the database to tell where anybody they didn't like has gone for a cab ride.
Now, that was the taxi company. Now merge this data with the data from restaurants, face-recognition software on video tapes from old surveillance cameras... etc...
The problem isn't that they can know what cab rides you have been on. The problem is that before you know it they can know what cab,bus,airplane,train you were on, what restaurant you ate at, where you placed a call with your cellphone, which "security" camera you walked by, what stores you visited.. etc etc... Much of this data is already being collected, and as long as it is kept there is little to stop a future government from suddenly overturning all privacy laws and demand access to all this data at once. If ( i.e when/already ) they do this they will be able to reconstruct your entire life. Were you politically inconvenient? Well, what have we known, suddenly there are laws which punish you retroactively...
The scary bit is that I don't even have to come up with a conspiracy theory. The law already permits it. The NSA already has the taps running, and the legislation is already in place. Good game.
This news is somewhat old in New York, and it's interesting to see slashdot spin this from a tech angle.
In actuality, many of the cab drivers are upset because if they are forced to accept credit cards, they will have to pay thousands of dollars out of their own money to install the flat-screens in the backseat, raise the price of renting a taxi itself to drive, and allow the credit card companies to pocket about a dollar out of every fare. That will add up.
Rather than throw technology at the cabs, I'd prefer if they made it a requirement that NY taxi drivers spoke English and knew their way around the city, like the London ones do.
Is that why we call it taking a 'break'? ;)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Good for them. I hope they win. There really are more important things in life than squeezing the last nickel out of everybody. Basic human dignity is one of them. There's no dignity in having a boss or a government agency knowing exactly where you are every second you're at work. That's going too far.
I don't respond to AC's.
How on Earth did you manage to use you're/your both correctly and incorrectly in the same sentence?
Peace sells, but who's buying?
No. Breaks are short for smoke breaks.
Originally, back when you were a child (or before), most people smoked. We took smoke breaks. Well, except for me (that is, I didn't smoke).
Then, as we moved away from smoking, we changed it to coffee breaks, starting first in industries where many women worked.
But that's an interesting way of looking at it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
An acquaintance of mine once regaled me of an anecdote of then the cabbies were on strike in NYC en masse. As it goes the traffic in manhattan was a dream, and that they should strike all the time.
Big brother avoidance and evasion is going to be big business.
I hate cabbies. NYC cabbies have gotten so bad over the past 10 years that I bought a car instead. They don't know where to go, they refuse to take you places they don't want to go - because they would rather a shorter fare for the initial minimum, or they'd rather land somewhere easier to find the next fare, or they don't know their way around, or they're a jerk. They're even worse drivers than ever before. I could go on an on, but that's not my point.
The point is that cabbies are right about this conflict. They could be safer with GPS, but they don't want their every move to be tracked: one of the few perks of being a cabbie is freedom of movement and privacy from "the boss". But most importantly, they are the ones who are being required to pay for all these new devices. Which bad passengers will smash, as they already have, and which cabbies will have to replace at their own cost. Not the fleets they work for, which make practically all the money, but the drivers themselves.
If NYC forces them to do this, the few with any self respect will leave. The ones who will shut up and take it will be the worst cabbies around. Even worse than the current low average.
And for what? So the City can make a few more bucks playing crappy, annoying ads to us? That the cabbie has to hear a thousand times a day, every day? So the City can spy on us, too, cross-referencing our credit cards with the GPS and probably audio (and maybe video) bugs inside the cars? Bloomberg is putting cameras everywhere, connected to probably the biggest database this side of the NSA. Probably part of the NSA system that's spying on us, whether justified by "traffic congestion" or "security" or "counterterrorism" or now, "protecting the cabbies".
This system is bogus. Even sleazoid cabbies are sickened by it. We shouldn't do it. Our civil liberties are often under the most serious threat for everyone when the undesirables scream about their own early sacrifice to the loss of liberty. This time it's us trapped in the metal box with them, in the same boat. We shouldn't let Big Brother use our cab rides to rationalize screwing all of us.
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make install -not war
No, you fucking fool, I am a native New Yorker. I live in Brooklyn, and have a public parking spot right in front of my house. Instead of all the bullshit I just itemized, that you're too stupid to read.
I've been taking public transit since you were sucking your mother's dick. You can take the cabs and put up with their crazy, stupid shit all the time. But if you knew anything about New York, you'd know that we'd rather be the assholes at the wheel than be at the mercy of one.
Anonymous poser Coward thinks they can talk shit about New York to a New Yorker.
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make install -not war
Your employer, if it is a private employer at least, may watch you as closely as they like. They can listen in on your phone calls (call centres often do this and they warn the callers it happens), they can read your e-mail in a company account, they can sit in your office and watch you do your work if they like.
This is because it is their property, thus their rules. It would be the same deal if you were at my house, using my computer. If I wanted to, I'd be free to sit and watch what you did, and go over the router logs later. My property, my rules.
Now that doesn't mean they can access things that don't belong to them, for example if you log in to your bank to check your account at work, your employer can't capture that information and use it to log in to your bank, that's illegal.
But in general, you have no expectation of privacy from your employer at work in the US. Most employers give their employees a measure of privacy, as they realise that if you are an asshole about it, you will find people just unwilling to work for you.
- The deal (for the GPS hardware and service) has been contraced to a vendor whose CEO is the President of the taxi garages' association.
- The association's Vice President for Business Development is the former First Deputy Commissioner of the TLC (NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission).
- The GPS vendor's Vice President of Operations is the TLC's former Deputy Commissioner of Safety and Emissions, the TLC officer in charge of all vehicle related issues.
No joke, look it up on google.