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US Regulators Seek To Reduce Road Deaths With Smartphone 'Driving Mode' (theguardian.com)
US regulators are seeking to reduce smartphone-related vehicle deaths with a new driving-safe mode that would block or modify apps to prevent them being a distraction while on the road. From a report on The Guardian:The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) are to issue voluntary guidelines for smartphone makers, which will seek to restrict the apps and services accessible on a smartphone being used by a driver. US transport secretary Anthony Foxx said: "Your smartphone becomes so many different things that it's not just a communication device. Distraction is still a problem. Too many people are dying and being injured on our roadways." The NHTSA is hoping that Apple, Samsung and other popular smartphone manufacturers will adopt the guidelines in future smartphone and software releases. The so-called driving mode will block distractions such as social media, messages or email, stop the use of the keyboard for communication activities and also restrict access to websites, video and distracting graphics. The intention is that the driving mode will be adopted in a similar manner to the airplane mode common to most smartphones and connected devices, which restricts radio communications while airborne. Airplane mode has been a feature of smartphones since 2007.
better put money in making autonomous vehicles more affordable...
Seems like this is a difficult problem to solve. Ideally the individual has sense enough to make the obvious choice to not interact with their device while driving. Sadly, that has not proven to be the case.
This depends on the phone operator putting the phone into driver mode. I think the people least likely to do that are the most intense phone users.
This sounds great in principle, but is it really going to do any good?
could've used this before slamming into the car in front of him. smh
Knowing how government works the first thing they'll disable while the car is moving is your navigation app.
I'd be happy with a feature that forces cellphones to shoot video in landscape orientation.
Require two hands on the steering wheel that will beep after 5 seconds (enough time to shift gears, change radio station, take a sip of coffee) and record each frequency on the car's black box.
(obviously, there would be overrides for one handed people)
One ass I work with has a 90 minute commute to work.
He was apparently gloating to people at lunch that he watches videos on an iPad which he keeps on the steering wheel during the drive.
He's already totaled one car (luckily no one else was involved).
Frankly, I don't think too many people would be upset if he drove himself into a tree (he's not a particularly likeable person). My problem is if he hits another car on the road.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I'm just guessing.... that maaaaybe these legislators don't ride the bus often?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
My phone already has Android Drive on it, which is designed to interact through voice instead of touch.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
" The intention is that the driving mode will be adopted in a similar manner to the airplane mode common to most smartphones and connected devices, which restricts radio communications while airborne."
Um, no, Airplane Mode restricts radio communication when it is enabled. By a user.
And my phone can't tell if it's airborne or not unless it lost all personalization and app settings again, thank you HTC and Google..
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Education is wonderful, but we can't fix stupid. Yet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The solution here is rather simple. It's called real fucking punishment for the people hurting or killing other humans on the road in incidents where distracted driving was clearly the cause.
Insurance companies should not cover any costs. The individual should have to. Suspended license for 12 months. On top of that, no US cellular carrier is legally allowed to issue offenders a phone in their name for a period of 6 months.
Driving while operating cellular devices is already against the law. Enforcement is only effective with actual deterrents. If we had real punishment, we wouldn't have to be going to such extremes as motion-sensitive apps, or trying to figure out how to block the driver and let the precious snowflakes in the other seats continue to feed their cellular addictions.
..how will they (compulsorily) limit this to the DRIVER? Anything short of that is nothing more than window-dressing to make legislators feel they're "doing something".
As they say: "Such driving modes are already implemented within certain Android smartphones, including Samsung models, but they are not compulsory and are up to the users to activate."
If they're already in place, are they making ANY difference? I'd guess not: people who are conscientious enough to voluntarily use the feature, are probably already sensible enough to not be responding to FB if they're driving anyway.
-Styopa
If I want to be distracted while driving, that is my right! If I want to look at kiddie porn while texting and receiving fellatio from Ron Paul, that is my right!
Nothing in the Constitution gives government the right to regulate driving. NOTHING.
Perhaps it also should be your "right" to pay for 100% of the costs associated with any incident caused by you championing your inalienable right to watch porn while operating 3,000 pounds of steel barrelling 70MPH down a freeway.
Nothing should require an insurance company to pay for your fuckups. NOTHING.
If they realy want to do something useful it's suggest the auto makers interrogate with phones as in get the hell out of the way. That means let them take over the touch screen and access the steering wheel controls etc. Give them access to the built in GPS etc. Then get out of the way, it might ruin 3k nav packages that suck and need $200 updates yearly.
Bonus points for putting in HUD's again and letting the phones access those.
Making cars safer can not be about restriction, it's not blocking IM's/email its doing text to speech and back again giving people a safer method to access and use that data.
No sir I dont like it.
Is not about distractions. The claim on planes is that there is spectrum interference. True or not, that's the lie you need to tell the voters wrt cars. (they do have a lot more electronics in them now adays. Fuck, just say it makes self-driving cars angry.)
It may be possible to put some sort of device inside the "A" pillar on the drivers side and then have the phone automatically enter Driver mode when the car is in motion and within X distance, about 3 feet, of the device.
Of course then people would be trying to operate their phones holding them at arms length over the passenger seat, which would be even more distracting.
I have also seen research which involved cameras watching the drivers eyes and using that data to understand what the driver is paying attention too. Perhaps using that kind of approach would be possible to block specific phones but that would be very expensive I would think.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
The government adds regulation for bathroom usage by gender swappers to enable government viewing of genitals.
This is just a move to put a government mandated switch on your ability to use a communication device. Call it what you will now.
Think of it as Evolution in Action. Those who use their apps while driving, will tend to remove themselves from the gene pool. . .
Except that they tend to remove other people from the gene pool who weren't dumb enough to play with their phone at the same time. So the gene pool is not improved because it has the same net number of dumb asses as before the accident.
Technically, nothing in the constitution gives you any right to drive
You have that backwards. Nothing in the constitution denies you the right to drive. The Constitution is mute on the subject of driving and anything it is mute about is left to the States and the citizens to decide for themselves.
Before smartphones there were handheld cell phones, radios to be fiddled with, newspapers to be read, makeup to be applied, food to be eaten, and children in the back seat to be yelled at...all activities being done by people who have come very close to kitting me at one time or another....lets make and enforce law against distracted driving without singling out particular distractions.
Anything connected to the car's bluetooth now only allows voice commands and no keyboard input. Passengers just need to get off the bluetooth (they probably aren't on it already) and they can do whatever they want. This should work fine with newer vehicles since most have bluetooth I believe.
There is a good reason for that: it's a safety feature. I have a Subaru Crosstrek w/ Starlink. If the car is in gear and I enter the address or place search mode, I can't type anything until the car is stationary. So I'd either have to pull over, or come to a stop until I can enter an address. The way your girlfriend could get around it is pull over, enter/change the address, let it navigate, and then merge again. Yeah, yeah, I know if you are in the passenger seat, you could do all that while she is driving w/o her getting distracted, but the car navigation safety architects make a very valid assumption that a lot of drivers drive alone to their destinations.
The other issue - sucks for finding destinations - varies according to the make, and also according to how easy/difficult they make it to update maps. My system has a removable 4GB SD card that has the maps, but nowhere can I find anything that allows me to update the maps. I bought this car in 2014 w/ the system, and it usually serves me well, but when I come across roads that were more recently extended, it obviously doesn't show on the maps. Unfortunately, there is no way to update the maps over the air, nor does there seem to be any server that has all the updated maps. My car doesn't use Carport or Android Auto, so I don't use my phone maps except in very rare situations.
Why can't I cue up several podcasts on soundcloud or a book on audible.com (while stationary) and then listen to them while I drive?
If I can legally interact with a dash mounted GPS (or in-car Nav system), why can't I run a Nav app on my phone and mount it to the dash?
What would be really smart is a way to map some generic steering wheel mounted buttons to controls in the phone's nav app. This could easily be achieved over bluetooth, the same way that handheld Powerpoint presentation devices emulate the PC keyboard and allow presenters to drive their slideshow from the remote.
Steering wheel buttons could get mapped to the Google Maps app for Zoom In, Zoom Out, Volume Up, Volume Down, Mute.
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
...between being the driver and passenger's device device?
It won't be able to know. There is no practical means I'm aware of to make the distinction. The only solution would be to disable all devices on that vehicle while it is in motion since there is no means to actually tell the difference.
what is more dangerous? Talking on the phone hands-free or pulling over to the breakdown lane to handle a phone call?
The solution here is rather simple. It's called real fucking punishment for the people hurting or killing other humans on the road in incidents where distracted driving was clearly the cause.
If you want to see how effective this is you merely need to look at drunk driving laws. It would have some effect but it wouldn't eliminate the problem. It also doesn't bring back to life the people that were killed by those who chose to behave irresponsibly.
The only solution that would actually work would be to basically restrict ALL phones in a car that is determined to be driving on a road automatically with no user option to override. This is technologically feasible. Yes this is an (overly?) harsh solution but realistically it's the only thing that would actually work. Depending on people to do it voluntarily is wishful thinking and demonstrably doesn't work. Depending on after the fact punishment doesn't bring back to life the people who were killed.
I thought it was not not allowed to use the aparatus at all. This would mean that you are now allowed to use it to at least receive calls. So the proposal becomes less strict.
I am also interested, as will be the rest of the world, how they will know the difference between the driver, the passenger. I am not talking about the owner of the device, I talk about the user of the device.
I often hand over my phone to the person next in shotgun to find some music they want to listen to, search a restaurant or call friends we are going to pick up. (Most of the time because I am too drunk to handle the phone and driving a get-away car takes up all my concentration, so I don' spill any meth.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
what about the passengers ?
What about them? Believe it or not operating your phone in a moving vehicle wasn't an option for close to 100 years. It's only in the last 30 that it has become a thing. I assure you that the passengers would survive without their smartphone fix for the duration of the drive. I spent most of my early driving years without any sort of mobile phone and not coincidentally 100% of us were not killed by people playing with their phones.
Sure, until they lock the cell firmware to an equivalent of UEFI secure boot on intel chips. You can disable it, but it also disables the cell radio and you can't get services. If they're a bitch about it, they'd do like Samsung has with some versions of Knox, where a tripped counter permanently disables some features (like Samsung Pay).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
GP missed traffic school, which said that driving is a privilege, not a right.
There is such a thing as 'asking'. Any driver who tells the app that s/he is the passenger is totally irresponsible.
Not effective enough. Remove all seatbelts and airbags, then install a solid spike on the steering wheel. On every car. Within a year the problem will have weeded itself out.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
So I am driving this rental right now that has an option for something called MirrorLink. They didn't activate it on the car, but I did a little (very little) digging and as far as I can tell its an app that allows you to push the screen from your phone to the screen in the car. With more cars starting to come with screens for the backup cameras, I think it makes perfect sense. Instead of re-inventing a way to make your car do all the things your phone can do, just send the content to the car. Granted, this isn't going to work for every app, but I think it would be a good step in the right direction. They could come up with some kind of mode that when your phone is paired with the car, it everything runs at the resolution of the car's screen, to make it easier for you to touch the interface.
Google Auto is supposed to already be MirrorLink enabled. I wish it were enabled in the rental, I would love to try it out.
If my next car comes with those features, they will be neutralized one way or another.
A device in the A-Pillar? Remove it. If the car won't work without it, move it to the trunk.
A camera? Remove it. If the car won't work without it, move it to the trunk where it can stare at a picture of my face looking at the right angle. Needs a moving image? sure, I have an old smartphone I can use to display a short video loop of my blinking and looking straight ahead.
How could you possibly miss the liberal sarcasm rampant in that post?
Do you mean liberal as in political viewpoint, or liberal as in generous amounts of sarcasm? I need to know so I can be properly offended.
Nope, no sig
Once a thing becomes enough of a problem where it's obvious it isn't going to fix itself, rules / laws and regulations show up to fix it for us.
Personally, I'm all for it. Been asking for it for years.
I see WAY too many people fiddling with their phone while driving. If I were to make an estimate, I would say one in four of everyone I'm driving around are on their phone.
Since people are too damned stupid to realize their behavior puts everyone ELSE at risk, then we have to rely on other methods to deal with it.
Self drive cars is one of them but will be a decade or more before those are commonplace.
Disabling everything except emergency calls while in motion is another.
Need to make a call, text your buddies or get your Candy Crush fix ? Pull the fuck over and do what you will.
Failure to do so will introduce Big Brother to the equation and he will do it for you, regardless of your opinion on the matter.
And as the laws in all 50 states declare it a privileged, my point still stands.
Wasn't arguing that your conclusion was invalid. Merely that your interpretation of how the law works was incorrect. For the most part the Constitution basically assumes Citizens have rights and it enumerates ways in which it restricts the government's ability to limit these rights. The 9th amendment also says in essence that rights may exist even when not enumerated. If you think that is unimportant then you are wrong. In principle driving could be considered a right even though as you properly point out we do not currently consider it one.
Thanks for being a pedantic ass, despite the fact you're still wrong.
First, I don't know where I was sufficiently rude to you to justify you calling me an ass but you are not a very nice person for doing so. Second, I am absolutely NOT wrong about anything I said. The Constitution IS mute on the subject of driving. If you want to call that pedantic fine but none of it is wrong.
For every new regulation, they need to get rid of two. Which two are they getting rid of for this one?
He already said he'd deregulate Wall Street.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
For every new regulation, they need to get rid of two.
Is that a new regulation?
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Require all phones to be able to be turned completely 'OFF', and require them all by law to be 'OFF' when the driver is driving. Phones in the back seat in the posession of a passenger are exempted. Cop finds you alone in your car with a phone turned on, you get a ticket, no excuses.
The data on cell phones causing an increase in accidents has never been statistically sound. It is based on assuming an untested contrapositive - If some percentage people in accidents were using their phone, then people not in accident were not using their phone.
The upwards trend in the use of mobile phones has coincided with a downwards trend in accident rates. There are many other variables in play.
I don't expect any measurable difference when they do this. They will do it in a way that the efficacy can't even be measured.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Actually, what parent said is precisely what Trump said he will do. Since he has to sign off on these regulations, he can, ultimately, enforce that. Which two regulations does this bill repeal? None? No signature.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
How could you possibly miss the liberal sarcasm rampant in that post?
In a word? Millennials.
They seem to think they have a "right" to everything these days, and it better be free.
How do you propose to tell the difference between a passenger and a driver?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Except that driving privileges is a state issue, so it's not Trump who will sign or decline any regulations here: it will be the governors - Cuomo, Brown, Abbott, et al. Also, this particular regulation does not have the sort of business impact that most OSHA regulations do, so it is not in the same category as say, a regulation that forces you to make your home a safe workplace if you happen to work from home.
Yeah, a regulation on regulations
... "disable app" industry.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I feel like AC meant both.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Oh, yes, and let's make it illegal to lie when answering that question. Surely, that will work in all the places where using a phone while driving is already illegal but people do it anyway. Right?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
USDOT does regulate at the Federal level, my friend. Did you forget that? States may choose not to enforce, but that doesn't mean the regulations hold no weight.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
This is where our imaginary friend(s) come in
I feel you've missed my point. The same irresponsible drivers who don't enable driving mode are already a problem; and you've already acknowledged that they will still be a problem if driving mode becomes an actual thing. Meanwhile, those of us with self control and respect for the responsibilities of every day life will also not enable it, because we just won't fuck with our phones while driving in the first place.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Interesting that you should say this. I too remember the phone number of my parents which they had since the 90s. However, they've never gotten rid of that service, since a lot of their friends only have that number as their contact, and it's too much of a pain to contact each one of them telling them that the number has changed. It would certainly have helped had portability of phone numbers applied to landline numbers as well
My car multimedia system is one of the paired devices to all my phones and tablets. When I get into the car w/ any of them and start it, the phone that I have, after detecting and connecting to it, automatically goes into driving mode. And yeah, I don't muck w/ it, but at the same time, it is by default automatically enabled.
If this happens, it's really going to fuck up my 2 hours of daily bus rides... :\
When I lived in Charlotte, for a couple of months, I used the Lynx rail service, and then the CATS bus service until I bought my car. Every morning (and evening), passengers were all busy w/ their phones. While some talked, others silently did things like read a book, listen to music/whatever, play games - all w/o disturbing others around them.
There is no reason to disable mobile services for them. Just b'cos people in the past didn't have cellphones doesn't mean they have to be disabled for today's generation. While the addiction of kids to tablets, phones and iPods is something of concern, it's an issue completely different from whether someone's phone should be disabled when s/he is driving or riding.
The laws should be minimal, practical and enforceable. Like require people to talk hands free - something that should be trivial w/ today's generation of cars. Absolutely ban (for drivers) things like texting and other playing w/ their phones. And enforce these laws, just like they enforce speeding, DUI and other traffic laws. On the navigation issue, encourage (don't mandate) cars to come w/ a navigation system as a default, and one where the maps can be trivially updated w/ Google Maps, Bing Maps or Apple Maps.
Airplane mode is great. I use it all the time, not on airplanes, but if I want to save battery for example. Of course I used it on airplanes as well.
Driver mode would also be great, if you could switch into it whenever YOU chose. If you were a driver, you could choose to put it on. If you were a passenger, you'd leave it off. The consequences for a driver not putting it on would be 1) social, 2) liability in the case of a crash.
There would be no need for the government or tech companies to have any more control over your phone than they currently do.
But it is also something you could just as well disable (either by turning off the setting, uninstalling the driving mode app, or buying a phone that doesn't include it in the first place) if you wanted to be an irresponsible jackass.Personally, I have a phone that doesn't have a driving mode and simply exercise self control to not use my phone while driving; it's really not difficult.
That you or I might be responsible, however, does not indicate that others will make the same wise decisions. As long as it can be disabled, irresponsible jackasses will disable it and carry on as they currently do; and if it can not be disabled, the law requiring it will not remain in effect for long as parents who can no longer hand their kids the phone to play games on to shut them up (and adult passengers who can no longer properly use their phones) will take swift action to ensure such a law is immediately and permanently repealed.
In short, it is currently, and will always be, voluntary and, as such, will be disabled or worked around by the very same people who ignore the current (unenforced) laws. Perhaps giving existing laws some teeth (fine and loss of license for first offense, jail time and permanent loss of license for second offense, just as an example) and actually enforcing those laws would have some effect.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
This...THIS is what regulators are going to choose to focus on? Seriously?
Too many people aren't dying/getting injured because of smartphones and other distractions, they're dying/getting injured because people are being idiots. How about educating people and showing them the grim result of their stupidity rather than trying to childproof the world? Right...That would mean having to actually *educate* people, and we know how well that's going in the US...
MetaRegulation, powered by /.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
The plane can't force you to use airplane mode.
From the featured article:
The guidelines for smartphones call for features able to differentiate between drivers and passengers within cars, so that only the driver is shown a simplified and restricted view.
Gription wrote:
How does a smart phone know what seat you are sitting in? If you want to hear a big outcry put the restrictions in place and wait for the passengers in cars, buses, and trains start to whine.with a new driving-safe mode.
I haven't read the guidelines yet, to see what these "features able to differentiate" are supposed to be. Are you claiming that the driving mode trigger will misdetect often and fail closed?
These days, I keep all my music on a USB thumb drive which plugs into the car's infotainment system, and just listen to that.
Provided that somebody buying a used car can find a car that supports USB thumb drives in addition to the buyer's other criteria.
I'm honestly shocked by how many people haven't discovered the concept of having their own recorded music on portable storage devices, and seem to think that the only way to listen to music is through some kind of radio (whether it's old-fashioned AM/FM or cellular data).
That's because renting the music for $10/mo plus cellular data charges is far cheaper than buying a permanent copy of each song for $1.29 per four minutes. Even the cellular data charges might not be much: assuming 64 kbps Opus audio through a $0.01 per MB connection, the cellular airtime for an hour of music costs 29 cents.* Talk radio at half the bitrate would cost half that. Besides, many apps that offer such a subscription include offline support, which stores a playlist's worth of music in the app's encrypted storage folder on the phone's file system and syncs when on an unmetered or lightly metered** connection at a home, public library, or restaurant.
* 64 kbit/s * 3600 s/hr * 1 MB/8000 kbit * 0.01 USD/MB = 0.288 USD/hr
** Such as the Comcast-owned cable ISP Xfinity Internet, whose 1000 GB/mo cap is far higher than that of any cellular ISP.
A few months ago, I was trying to record myself on a treadmill demonstrating a few unusual gaits. (In this continuity, Silly Walks is an agency under the Ministry of Health.) But the room wasn't deep enough for my camcorder on a tripod to capture both the head and feet, even with the zoom set to widest. So instead, I had to set it to portrait. What would you have done instead?
You could allow a call to go to voice mail and then return it once you reach a gas station through the next exit. Or how is that more dangerous than talking while driving or using the breakdown lane?
I got most of my music on CD about 10-20 years ago, and right now I'm lucky if I spend more than $30/year on any new music.
If you're trying out different musical genres, it'll cost you far more than $30 per year.
and then putting up with outages and dead spots (which are common where I live)
Again, offline mode in the rental services works around this: download at home where your cap is 1000 GB/mo, then stream without using any cellular data.