This can easily be implemented without tracking citizens!
Imagine a scheme where each car is required have a black box mounted. This black box contains:
A digitized map of your country diveded into zones of different price.
A GPS reciever.
A "tax-o-meter" that counts up according to speed and zone.
A port that outputs how much tax you owe, and where you are (So that you can plug your own navigation system into the GPS reciever)
The black box would only do counting, not tracking. Of course the box should be sealed, so the police could check whether it had been tampered with, but if it was allowed to "crack it open" directly after paying accumulated tax, privacy advocates could take samples to check that nothing 1984ish was going on. One could even allow independent reviewers to crack open a number of boxes of their own choice "for free" so that economy would not be a hindrance.
I like this technology, because it would allow taxing drivers congesting roads in areas with good public transportation harder than people living in sparsely populated rural areas where car-driving is a necessity. A lot of people here seems to feel very bad about taxes on cars, but I'm from Denmark where they are taxed really hard already, so shifting the taxes in a more fair direction (while providing everyone with REALLY mass produced GPS navigation) is fine with me.
My only serious objection to this scheme is that it's probably too easy to jam the GPS reciever, but if you couple it with the odometer it could set the "Cheat flag" if you drive several miles without GPS coverage.
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This can easily be implemented without tracking citizens!
Imagine a scheme where each car is required have a black box mounted. This black box contains:
A digitized map of your country diveded into zones of different price.
A GPS reciever.
A "tax-o-meter" that counts up according to speed and zone.
A port that outputs how much tax you owe, and where you are (So that you can plug your own navigation system into the GPS reciever)
The black box would only do counting, not tracking. Of course the box should be sealed, so the police could check whether it had been tampered with, but if it was allowed to "crack it open" directly after paying accumulated tax, privacy advocates could take samples to check that nothing 1984ish was going on. One could even allow independent reviewers to crack open a number of boxes of their own choice "for free" so that economy would not be a hindrance.
I like this technology, because it would allow taxing drivers congesting roads in areas with good public transportation harder than people living in sparsely populated rural areas where car-driving is a necessity.
A lot of people here seems to feel very bad about taxes on cars, but I'm from Denmark where they are taxed really hard already, so shifting the taxes in a more fair direction (while providing everyone with REALLY mass produced GPS navigation) is fine with me.
My only serious objection to this scheme is that it's probably too easy to jam the GPS reciever, but if you couple it with the odometer it could set the "Cheat flag" if you drive several miles without GPS coverage.
Just my kr. 0,02