Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

We’re clearly moving towards a tipping point on total traffic surveillance. Here’s SF’s contribution:

Big Brother will be watching you.

Within the next 15 months, every one of Muni’s 819 buses will be outfitted with cameras capable of snapping photos of vehicles illegally travelling or parking in The City’s transit-only lanes. Any car caught on tape will be subject to fines of up to $115.

Since 2008, about 30 Muni buses have been equipped with the cameras. And even though the rollout has been modest so far, the results have been telling, said John Haley, transit director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates Muni.

“The cameras have been instrumental in changing driver behavior,” said Haley. “When cars see a bus coming, they get the hell out of the way now.”

— Muni expanding camera program to nab drivers in transit-only lanes

Spotted via Slashdot, San Francisco Enlists Bus Cameras For Traffic Law Enforcement.

So both government and private industry (insurance) will be watching us. Parents following kids are next (cellphone based apps already provide a form of this service, but it’s easier to ditch the phone than the car). Then we start monitoring people parked near bars. Eventually we move to predictive models of traffic violation. Then maybe we start modeling other crimes, like drug buys and curb crawling. (Pity it doesn’t work for insider trading.) Meanwhile the huge databases are constructed for use by law enforcement, and discovery in civil suits. Even if all this remains on balance benign in rule-of-law democracies, it invites small-scale abuses.

And in autocracies we can expect large-scale abuses on a grand scale. That’s a serious problem that doesn’t get thought about nearly enough as we build and then export the technologies.

TomTom has signed a deal with an insurance company to use its satnav technology to measure driving ability to set premiums.

The satnav specialist said it has teamed up with Motaquote on Fair Pay Insurance – a product that the companies claim rewards ‘good’ drivers with lower premiums, using technology to monitor driver behaviour.

— TomTom tech to set driver insurance premiums (spotted via Slashdot.)

Sorry to sound like a broken record here, but I predicted something like this over a decade ago in The Death of Privacy?. That doesn’t mean I have to like it…although in principle this one I hate a little less than some, since at least it’s a private transaction, and in theory you have some choice about whether you sign on for it.

The problem is that the choice to refrain likely won’t last long. Other companies are already doing something similar. See for example Progressive Insurance’s “Snapshot” program that monitors your driving for 30 days in order to figure out your quote. Once this sort of monitoring becomes widespread, those who do not sign up for it will be dumped into the high-risk pool. This seems to be an example of the phenomenon discussed so well by Lior Strahilevitz in Privacy versus Antidiscrimination.

Previously:

• Total Traffic Surveillance Systems (2/4/12)
• Privacy Myopia, Economics of (5/18/09)
• Who Owns Transaction Information? (5/4/08)
• I Predicted This Years Ago (6/6/07) (divorce lawyers are using commuter records to make their cases)
• The Rise of Masks in Public (10/8/05)

Update (2/10/12): Looks like insurers will be tracking drivers in the UK too:

The AA is set to launch a new insurance policy which uses sat-nav technology to track driver performance.

The firm said the system would allow its better drivers to receive cheaper premiums.

It follows similar efforts by smaller insurers. Larger rival Direct Line has told the BBC it is also piloting its own “black box” scheme.